Beautiful balloon: The digital divide and the charisma of new ...

WILLIAM MAZZARELLAUniversity of Chicago

Beautiful balloon:The digital divide and the charisma of new media in India

A B S T R A C TAgainst the view that the millennium brought onlyunrealistic hype around the socially transformativepotentials of the Internet, I argue for skepticismvis-a-vis the “realistic” stance that is now employedto evaluate the success of development-orientedapplications of the Internet in India. Focusing onthe heyday of ICT4D (information andcommunication technologies for development)projects, I move beyond the stalemate of hypeversus debunking to suggest, instead, that althoughthe discourse of development helped to legitimizethe Internet as an “appropriate technology,” itsemphasis on functional solutions also helped toobscure the Internet’s more ambiguous emergentpotentials. [Internet, development, emergence,digital divide, India]

An idea whose time has come has no time to waste.

—Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics

It was a truly millennial idea. Around 1999–2000, the shiny amal-gam of ideas, projects, and hyperventilation known as ICT4D (infor-mation and communication technologies for development) seemedto be taking over the world. Nowhere was its promise more in-tensely cultivated than in India because nowhere else were its two

main aims—gratifying middle-class technofetishism and overcoming ru-ral underdevelopment—to be found in such stark juxtaposition. At its corewas an image at once simple and grandiose: a wired world. Connecting themost remote rural villages in the poorest regions of the world to the Inter-net would result in everyone receiving a passport to either (depending onone’s ideological orientation) the information superhighway or the globalknowledge society.

ICT4D redefined the most pressing problem in the world—poverty—and then promised to solve it by bridging the “digital divide” between thewired and the unwired, between global cities and information slums. Likeso many millennial ideas, it brought together the most humdrum practi-cal objectives with the most sweeping claims about the global future. Likeso many millennial ideas, it was at once strangely familiar and excitinglynew.1 And, like so many millennial ideas, after a brief, incandescent burstof excitement, its star imploded. “Many of the ICT experiments aimed atpoverty reduction are floundering. In fact, their performance has been dis-mal and most of these projects have . . . failed to deliver on their promises.Anecdotal evidence showing the success of these projects crumbles underrational and critical scrutiny” (Sreekumar and Rivera-Sanchez 2008:164).

In its glory years, though, ICT4D promised to revolutionize developmentcommunication. In the language of Alexander Linden and Jackie Fenn’sHype Cycle Model (as adapted by Sreekumar 2003), those years aroundthe millennium might be categorized as an early “peak of inflated expec-tations,” followed by a downward curve of “disillusionment” and then a

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 783–804, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C© 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01285.x

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gradual upward movement toward “increasing realism” andperhaps even, ultimately, a “plateau of productivity.” A fewyears in, the previously utopian ICT4D literature did seemto be nursing a bit of a hangover and moving into a more“realist” phase. Certainly the emphasis in much recent writ-ing has been on soberly self-critical retrospective evalua-tions of ICT4D projects: what worked, what did not, andwhy.

In this article, I take a rather different tack. Perhapsperversely, I remain interested in the peak of the ICT4Dhype cycle precisely because of its inflated, excessive tone.The discourse of ICT4D at the peak of the hype cycle was,in ways that I explore below, obviously deeply ideological,and interesting as such. But it also registered somethingreal about the performative efficacy of what one might call“technological charisma.” That is to say, the hype was notjust empty; rather, it brought about its own concrete so-cial effects “on the ground.” These social effects might nothave been neatly measurable by the yardsticks of ICT4D dis-course; in fact, they were perhaps even often unintelligiblewithin its terms. Nevertheless, ICT4D discourse, as an ob-ject of collective desire, helped to enable them.

My project in this article, then, is at once to clarify andto move beyond the characteristic ways in which ICT4D wasfirst pumped and then dumped. Typically, commentary onICT4D takes one of two tacks. The first approach acceptsthe basic premise of ICT4D and criticizes its claims “fromwithin” those premises. In that mode, one evaluates thesuccess or failure of an ICT4D project according to whetherit has or has not achieved its stated aims. The second ap-proach proceeds “from without.” It assumes a priori thatbecause ICT4D is an ideological discourse complicit withcorporate or statist agendas, one must look for its truth be-hind the mask, in some other, more “real” domain of socialpractice. Here, ICT4D becomes little more than an ideolog-ical smoke screen, allowing politics as usual to proceed cor-ruptly behind an appearance of probity and reform.

Although both of these types of critique are necessary,my assumption here is that they are not sufficient. The cri-tique from within is insufficiently critical of the assump-tions that structure ICT4D discourse and is, in that sense,too close to its object. The critique from without is insuf-ficiently attentive to the specificity of ICT4D. It tends toassimilate ICT4D into a ready-made critique of “neolib-eralism,” “globalization,” or some other such concept. Inthat sense, the second mode of critique is too distant fromICT4D as a historically specific assemblage of technologies,actors, and ideologies that generates emergent potentialsthat cannot be specified in advance according to prefabri-cated heuristics like “dependency,” “commodity logic,” andso on.

What I pursue here is a third approach that is both crit-ical of ICT4D discourse qua ideology and sensitive to thegenuine performative efficacy of this ideology. To achieve

this, I examine the structure of ICT4D discourse, worldwideand in India. I explore how ICT4D provisionally pulled to-gether apparently disparate interests and how computers,of all things, came to be seen as “appropriate technologies”for the development of Indian villages. I give a quick sketchof some of the conventional objections that were aimed atICT4D and, building on an ethnographic encounter of myown, take some tentative steps toward an alternative anal-ysis. If the keyword informing both celebrations and cri-tiques of ICT4D has in many ways been transparency, thenthe keyword animating my alternative approach may wellbe emergence.

A couple of qualifications before getting started. First, Iam operating with a rather expanded conception of ICT4D.Some might argue that many of the projects and initiativesthat I discuss in the pages that follow—for instance, thosethat are not primarily aimed at poor people—are not re-ally examples of ICT4D but, rather, cases of e-governance,another category to which I devote some attention be-low. Although I recognize (and, indeed, to some extent de-scribe) the substantive differences between these kinds ofprojects, one of my aims in this article is to show howdeeply ICT4D and e-governance were dependent on eachother as ideological discourses. ICT4D lent the ethical grav-itas of social justice and grassroots development to theworld of hi-tech, and e-governance became a relay pointthrough which corporate and managerial idioms of trans-parency and efficiency could modulate the long-standingstatist discourse of social development. I choose ICT4D asmy umbrella term, then, partly out of recognition that itsD marks a crucial transformation of the meaning of “devel-opment” during the years I describe here: from a state-ledpaternalist conception of rural uplift and social justice toa more ambiguous blend of activist, entrepreneurial, andeven national-psychological aspirations.

Second, this article is about events that took place adecade or so before the time of its writing. To many Indi-ans, the Internet seemed new and strange then; today, al-though it still remains out of reach of a majority, it has beenmuch more comprehensively absorbed into everyday life. Ifthis is an article about projects that, a decade ago, promisedparticular futures, then why would I not want to bring thestory up to date by going back to those projects and find-ing out whether their old futures have or have not turnedinto the present? My decision not to “update” this projectby conducting follow-up field visits stems from my discom-fort with the kind of functionalist explanation that this kindof method has tended to produce in discussions of ICT4D.Alongside the widespread disillusionment of ICT4D failurestories, there is now also a thriving discourse that one mightcall “development-despite-itself.” Congenial to the cultur-alist populism of much anthropology, such accounts docu-ment the inventive and unforeseen uses to which ordinarypeople have put communications technologies, thus once

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again apparently proving that culture, not states or NGOs,knows best. As a corollary to this argument, the peak ofthe ICT4D hype cycle is typically dismissed as nothing butthe kind of ideological hubris that will inevitably be dashedagainst the rocks of realism. My desire in these pages, how-ever, is to resist the temptation of thinking that once theowl of Minerva has taken wing, a decade on, scholars areable to discern the truth of these media simply because wenow “know what happened.” What I offer here is a differentkind of retrospection that does not judge the promises ofthe past merely according to the outcomes of the present, asif technologies—or, indeed, any social phenomena—moveonly along a one-way street from virtual potentiality to so-cial actuality. A decade down the line, I return to the peakof the ICT4D hype cycle not to separate fiction from realitybut, rather, to recall the importance of attending to the per-formative potentials that live even—perhaps especially—inthe most ideological discourse.

All photos by W. Mazzarella.

Beautiful balloon

Development talk tends to be eminently functional: practi-cal solutions for practical problems. In this regard, ICT4Dwas by no means anomalous (cf. Ginsburg 2008). A typicalIndian ICT4D project, for example, might involve digitiz-

ing rural landholding records so as to minimize corruptionand to make the information easily accessible online. Be-fore digitized land records, a farmer wishing to sow a cropwould have to go through something like the following pro-cess. To secure the loan that would enable him to buy thenecessary inputs for a new cycle of cultivation, the farmerwould need to produce a Rights of Tenancy and Cultivation(RTC) form, certified by the local authority and attestingto the size and ownership of a particular plot of land. Notonly were the data on the RTC forms notoriously open toalteration by bribe but gaining access to authorized copieswas also often an arduous matter, involving lengthy and of-ten fruitless journeys between villages and district head-quarters. More often than not, relevant officials were absentfrom their desks (“out of station”). Even if the petitioner wasable to submit his application, gratuitous delays in process-ing meant that he sometimes received the document onlyafter the time for planting had already passed. By contrast,digitized land records were easily and locally available on-line and, for a small fee, printable at rural infokiosks andtelecenters established by ICT4D projects. Alongside sucheminently practical projects were many others, similarly in-vested in the functional benefits of making crucial informa-tion at once more inviolable and more available: produceprices in local markets, weather reports, and information ongovernment programs.

Alongside its functional face, however, ICT4D dis-course also had a strongly messianic aspect, as if its ar-rival betokened a kind of world-historical resolution oflong-standing contradictions. So, for example, ICT4D pre-sented itself as doing away with the traditional opposi-tion between top-down technocratic development policyand bottom-up community activism. As a medium, theInternet appeared to combine universality with infiniteparticularity, broadcasting with interactivity. Perhaps mostspectacularly, ICT4D was sold as a reconciliation betweenneoliberal capitalism and the interests of the poorest peoplein the world—in ICT4D lingo, the “bottom of the pyramid”(BOP). C. K. Prahalad, BOP guru, spoke of a new “inclu-sive capitalism.” Bill Gates referred to “creative capitalism.”Any number of other variations followed in the desire to“marketize poverty” (see Schwittay 2008): “compassionatecapitalism,” “virtuous capitalism,” “social capitalism,” “en-lightened capitalism,” and “doing good while doing well.”In Prahalad and Stuart Hart’s words, “We believe that pur-suing strategies for the bottom of the pyramid dissolves theconflict between proponents of free trade and capitalism on[the] one hand, and environmental and social sustainabilityon the other” (2002).

For a country like India, which in the 1990s had seena progressively intensifying tension between a middle-class-driven agenda of consumerist liberalization and amounting series of popular grassroots agitations againstneoliberal policies, such a formula was extraordinarily

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seductive. In addition, the new dispensation was goingto be enabled by ICTs at a time when precisely the ICTsector was looking like India’s ticket to global recogni-tion.2 The result was something like the perfect ideologicalstorm.

By the turn of the millennium, ICTs were red hot. In1990, the Indian ICT business had, by one estimate, beenworth a mere $20 million. Its most explosive growth coin-cided with the liberalization of the Indian economy. Startingin 1992, the ICT sector grew at an average rate of 60 percentper annum, reaching a value of $4 billion by the end of thedecade, out of which some $2.6 billion derived from exports(Bajpai and Rajdou 2000).3 At its peak, just as in the rest ofthe world, the boom sent ICT stocks into the stratosphere.In India, the boom–bust rollercoaster was particularly fast:During the crazed 11 weeks stretching from the beginningof November 1999 to the middle of January 2000, the Infor-mation Technology, Communications and EntertainmentIndex of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) soared by 117percent.4 No wonder, then, as one commentator put it, that“nothing has captured the imagination of India’s policy-makers quite like information technology” (Singh 2001:24).

In what sense had ICT captured the imagination of pol-icy makers? For the first couple of decades after Indian In-dependence, Nehruvian developmentalism combined a so-cialist discourse of “uplifting” the poor and a middle-classfascination with technology-led growth. From the late 1960sonward, the pluralization of Indian party politics meant

that the nationalist middle classes, although still influen-tial, increasingly had to compete with a range of risingsubaltern and regional political forces. India’s turn towardconsumerist liberalization from the mid-1980s onward pro-vided the middle classes with a social and political languagethrough which they could once again claim to be speak-ing on behalf of the Indian public at large, now in the guiseof consumer citizenship (Fernandes 2006; Mazzarella 2003,2005). However, the desire for rapid technological and in-dustrial growth remained strong alongside the new con-sumerist paradigm. Devesh Kapur stresses how intimatelyIndian middle-class anxieties were connected to a sense ofcompetitive failure on a global stage: “By the late 1980s, In-dia had lost faith in itself, as its elites grappled with the re-ality of the country’s growing relative backwardness, partic-ularly in comparison to other Asian countries” (2002:109).At this level, ICT4D also reconciled an older desire to “catchup” with a newer discourse of customer service and con-sumer rights, all under the socially legitimating sign of ruraldevelopment.

For a brief, enchanted period, ICT reflected and magni-fied every dream. Waxing lyrical in the midst of an otherwiserather cynical diatribe, one of my e-business informants ru-minated on the ICT boom: “It’s like the Internet was nevermeant to be so much of what it is today . . . It just got caughtup with these image sellers and these large campaigns andhas blown. And it blew so beautifully. I mean, what we sawuntil two, three and a half years back—wow! What a balloon!

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I mean you couldn’t have blown anything higher than that.And it moved money.”

The village assembly will not be televised

In the summer of 2002, I traveled to India looking to find outmore about ICT4D. An acquaintance, knowing that I was in-terested in visiting some project sites, mentioned Bellandur,the eponymous village in a district not far from Bangalore. Aphone call later, I found myself in a car bumping down theroad to Bellandur. The man at the wheel, Jagannath Reddy,was wiry and energetic. Hailing from a family of farmers inand around the village, he was—like his father and uncle be-fore him—the president of the local gram panchayat (villagecouncil).

A community of some five thousand people, Bellandurbenefits from being located on a lake and thus having itsown source of water.5 By the time of my visit, however, thelake had become badly polluted by Bangalore-based indus-tries. Jagannath recalled swimming in the lake as a child;now its waters were too toxic for any aquatic life to survive.With the connivance of the Karnataka state government, de-velopers had taken advantage of a loophole in land taxationlaws and started constructing residential apartment tow-ers for commuters on tax-exempt land officially set asidefor farming. Jagannath was keen to distinguish the kind ofdevelopment that local control of ICTs might enable fromthe sort that, he said, was turning his village into a “con-crete jungle.” A paved main street lined with lights bisectedthe center of the village, featuring a chemist and severalstores, including a clothes shop, right opposite the pan-chayat building. At the end of the street, a ring road kept asteady stream of heavy traffic thundering by. At the time ofmy visit, I was told, some fifty of the wealthier householdsowned their own computers, most with Internet connec-tions. The village as a whole enjoyed around four hundredtelephone lines. This was, then, by no means an isolatedcommunity; indeed, at the time Bellandur was slowly be-ing folded into the urban sprawl of greater Bangalore. Nev-ertheless, the sense of distance from the cybercafes, techparks, and pubs of the city was palpable.

Back in 1993, the panchayat had invested in a type-writer to help produce more authoritative-looking records,minutes, memos, and representations. Five years later, thevillage clubbed together to buy a computer.6 By the time Ivisited, this original machine had been joined by another,both of them housed in the front office of the panchayatbuilding. Initially, the panchayat had mainly used its com-puters for word processing, as glorified typewriters. But oneday a journalist from the English-language press had writ-ten a feature on this quaint exemplar of grassroots mod-ernization, and the resultant publicity had started attract-ing all kinds of new attention and resources to the village.By then, the Bangalore tech world was already abuzz with

talk of bridging the digital divide, ICT4D, and e-governance.Sensing a proximate opportunity for field trials and goodPR, the Bangalore software company Compusol donateda Kannada-language package to the Bellandur panchayat.With it, the village council was able to begin computerizingbirth and death certificates, voter lists, ration cards, prop-erty records, tax assessments, and utility bills. No longerwould powerful landowners be able to bribe their way outof paying property taxes. Jagannath explained to me thatmany local notables, used to getting away with a token ru-pee or so in taxes, had initially resisted the computer-basedaccountability crusade that would now force them to coughup thousands. Some had even run for election to the pan-chayat on a promise to oppose it. But the collective ben-efit to be had from the infrastructure improvements paidfor by the new tax revenue had eventually squashed theresistance.

Then Jagannath told me a remarkable story. In a bid tobring the same transparency to local decision making that ithad introduced to record keeping, the Bellandur gram pan-chayat had recently started transmitting its proceedings liveby closed-circuit cable television to the local population,who were apparently tuning in with some interest. Once ayear, the village council also called a big meeting, the gramsabha (village assembly), to which everyone was invited, in-cluding officials representing higher, district levels of theadministration. The idea was for policies to be presentedand discussed in a collective face-to-face setting. The villagecouncil decided to televise this meeting as well. But becausethere had been such enthusiasm about watching the broad-cast, hardly anyone actually showed up to the meeting it-self. In this instance, the call to be at once participants inand spectators of a newly transparent political process pro-duced only an empty mirror. At home, in front of their TVs,Bellandur’s villagers watched themselves not taking part inthe village assembly.

I have often thought about Jagannath’s story in theyears since I met him. It has a delightful sense of symme-try and feels like an exquisite allegory. But of what? At a firstapproach, it sounds like an updated version of Gil Scott-Heron’s old song–slogan “The Revolution Will Not Be Tele-vised” (1970).7 One is either part of the political process orone is a spectator of the spectacle; making a change meansgetting off the couch and stepping into the street. But if Ja-gannath was trying to convey his pride about Bellandur asa tech-savvy community, then why would he tell me sucha story? If anything, it would seem to suggest that Bellan-dur’s technophilia had gone too far, that it was underminingthe very transparency that it was supposed to enable. Thiswould then be a case of altogether too much perspective—if, with Erwin Panofsky (1993), one takes perspective in itsliteral sense: “seeing through.” Or, as Slavoj Zizek has ob-served, “we are not able to see something because it istransparent, because we see through it” (2006:214; see also

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Mazzarella 2006). Perhaps Jagannath told me this story pre-cisely as a reminder of why the Internet was better than tele-vision. With television, one is either a participant or a spec-tator; one cannot both be acting on the political stage andwatching from the audience. But with the Internet’s interac-tivity, one can be both spectator and participant at the sametime, because the political stage has itself become virtual,distributed. And yet this is not what Bellandur was actuallydoing with its computers. So, again: why this story, whichwas told to me not with outrage but with a quiet chuckle?Perhaps Jagannath was offering me a sly comment on thecomplex charisma of ICT: the ambiguous ways it could mo-bilize people at once far beyond and far short of the officialaims of ICT4D.

Digital development

ICT4D ideology brought together, in a powerful compound,the promise of arrival at two long-deferred destinations: de-velopment and world recognition.

Development first. At the peak of the Indian ICT boom,readers of glossy current-affairs periodicals like India To-day and Outlook were regaled with a seemingly endless se-ries of calculatedly enchanting, lavishly illustrated reportsof ICT4D projects in the rural hinterlands. To wit:

Every evening, Govardhan Angari lights a joss stick andoffers a silent prayer to a computer in a poky 20 sqft room in Dehri Sarai, a village 40 km from Indore inMadhya Pradesh’s Dhar district. Beside the Pentium IImachine on a creaky table, there is a modem, a sheafof white paper and a battery back-up. This unremark-able paraphernalia has changed the life of the 21 year-old boy, a landless Bhil tribal and son of [a] daily wagelabourer who takes home Rs 40 [about $0.90] on dayswhen he finds work. These days, Govardhan earns up toRs 3,500 [around $80] a month ferreting out crop mar-ket rates, e-mailing villagers’ grouses, generating casteand land certificates out of this rural cyberkiosk. On theside, he teaches some sixteen village children the basicsof computing. “I saw a computer for the first time onlylast year,” says Govardhan. [Biswas 2001]

This vignette contains, in compressed form, all the cru-cial modes in which ICT4D remediated the problems of ru-ral development.8 Statist approaches to development hadbeen fetishistically attached to technocratic solutions sinceat least the Second Five Year Plan (1956–61). But the con-stancy of Govardhan Angari’s prayer to the computer re-assuringly grounds such devotion in the “authentic” time-lessness of Indian tradition. The description contains theobligatory frisson generated by the aesthetic tension be-tween the hypermodern and the homemade (“the PentiumII machine on a creaky table”).9 Angari’s description as alandless “tribal” not only suggests that computers are as ap-

propriate for the most marginalized segments of the Indianpopulation as they are for the most privileged but it alsoemphasizes the transformative potential of a technologythat has “changed [his] life,” when decades of government-sponsored rural uplift schemes have failed.10 The computerturns out to be much more than a consumer luxury. Here itis eminently useful (“ferreting out crop market rates”) and,as such, fits smoothly into a developmentalist discoursethat is premised, above all, on the notion that, whereasmiddle-class consumers may be driven by the pursuit ofpleasure, the rural poor are motivated by functional util-ity. The grassroots e-governance possibilities of the Internetare hinted at (“e-mailing villagers’ grouses”), and the projectseems organically set to achieve the Holy Grail of all de-velopment interventions—to replicate itself (“On the side,he teaches some sixteen village children the basics of com-puting”). Finally, and decisively, the uses and possibilities ofcomputers are presented as intuitively self-evident, even tothe nonwired and the uneducated (“‘I saw a computer forthe first time only last year’”). Unlike the artifices of statistdevelopment pedagogy, appropriate ICTs will bring aboutchange automatically.

Any number of projects and initiatives either founda home under the ICT4D banner or were able to drawon its ethical aura. There were international joint ven-tures between Indian governments (central or regional)and foreign research institutions, such as the short-livedMedia Lab Asia (“innovating for digital inclusion”) andthe equally ill-fated Sankhya Vahini backbone project.11

There were tie-ups between transnational consumer tech-nology companies and Indian state governments, suchas Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) “e-inclusion”–“i-communities”deal with Chandrababu Naidu, the tech-savvy chief min-ister of Andhra Pradesh (Schwittay 2008). There were dias-poric venture-capital-raising networks like Digital Partners,through which U.S.-based Indians coordinated investmentsin subcontinental ICT4D projects.

Other initiatives, internal to India, brought togetheracademic and corporate players. In some cases, as with theChennai-based M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, re-search projects that had already for years been pursuingsocially conscious technology solutions at the intersectionof “traditional and frontier technologies” found the main-stream newly receptive to their ideas.12 Other partnershipswere new: for instance, the one that led to the handheldSimputer, incubated at the Indian Institute of Science atBangalore, licensed to two companies for production, andlaunched with much fanfare in 2001.13

Finally, various projects combined government sup-port in different configurations with private tech-sector in-novation and grassroots entrepreneurial initiative. Someof these were primarily oriented toward “e-governance,”the computerized streamlining of bureaucracy, such asthe eSeva bill payment system in Andhra Pradesh. Others

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combined existing technologies to make Internet-sourcedinformation available locally. For example, a UNESCO-supported “radio browsing” project in Kothmale, Sri Lanka,allowed radio listeners to call in information requests toan operator who would find answers on the Internet andbroadcast them back out to the community (Sood 2002).Some, like Bhoomi in Karnataka, focused on computerizingland records. Others sought to combine development andcommercial agendas by establishing regional intranets thatwould serve the practical needs of rural populations whileat the same time giving consumer-goods corporations ac-cess to emergent rural markets.14

The notion of the “digital divide” positioned ICTs as atonce the index of and the solution to underdevelopment.Prior to 1996, Kenneth Keniston notes, the phrase “digitaldivide” occurred only in the more obscure reaches of math-ematics. But after that, and especially after 1999, when itwas taken up by the United Nations’ Human DevelopmentReport, it became “the slogan of the season, the mantra ofthe year” (Keniston 2002a).15 Being on the wrong side of thedigital divide now meant languishing in a state of “infor-mation poverty.” By 1991, when the World Bank poured abillion U.S. dollars into boosting ICTs in developing coun-tries, just as India announced its liberalizing reforms, thisconcept of “information poverty” had acquired a doubleedge. On the one hand, it indexed a lament about globalmarginality and oppression; on the other hand, it expressedshame over poor telecommunications infrastructure as abarrier to successful participation in global markets. Theemergent discourse of the “knowledge society,” solemnizedat large-scale events like the Global Knowledge ’97 confer-ence (jointly sponsored by the World Bank and the Gov-ernment of Canada), allowed a rhetoric of social justiceto blend with an entrepreneurial agenda that was by nomeans necessarily critical of large-scale corporate interests.In 2000, the World Bank announced its Global DevelopmentGateway website, an extension of the InfoDev initiative thatit had been running since 1995. And in 2002, the United Na-tions, via the World Economic Forum, started soliciting theparticipation of corporate leaders in what it called the “CEOCharter for Digital Development.”

The Indian political class quickly adopted this dis-course of digital development. As one of my informants inthe Mumbai e-business world told me with some relish inthe summer of 2002,

All the Chief Ministers in India are in shit because ofthat Chandrababu Naidu now! He’s created so muchpeer pressure for them; he’s made life miserable! Ev-ery one of them has been having an IT company’s headwith him in his advisory panel to teach him to talk ITnow. Whether they want to implement it or not. But ev-erybody has told their PR company “go and get me oneIT guru—I need to talk some IT!”

In 1998, the prime minister’s office appointed a NationalTaskforce on Information Technology and Software De-velopment. Adapting the rhetoric of information poverty,Tamil Nadu chief secretary Muthuswamy declared in 1999that “the poor continue to be so not because they have lessincome but [because they have less access] to knowledgeand information . . . A majority of people suffer from knowl-edge gap, information gap, and nutrition gap and societysuffers from infrastructure gap, technological gap and mar-keting gap” (Hindu 1999). The line between entrepreneur-ship and uplift had never been so blurry. By the turn of themillennium, when then prime minister A. B. Vajpayee be-gan to allow private ISPs (Internet service providers), thepress greeted the move as helping “to create conditions formoving us out of the information slum” (Kanavi 2000).

Even as underdevelopment was being redefined as abusiness opportunity, India was positioning itself as theworld-historical heir to the mantle of progress. The IT min-istry of the central government appointed a working groupon “IT for the Masses,” with a charter to devise ways to“broad-base” digital technologies. This working group con-cluded, with conveniently dialectical elan, that backward-ness after decades of stagnation under the planned econ-omy was precisely what had produced the pent-up energythat would send an e-enabled India spinning out spectacu-larly onto the global stage (Gopalakrishnan 2001).

Global recognition

The prospect of an “India Unbound” (Das 2000) finally get-ting the global recognition it had so long been denied wasthe other arrival heralded by ICT4D. Then U.S. president BillClinton paid an official visit to the country in March 2000and “expressed amazement at the strides India had takenin IT.” His private-sector counterpart Bill Gates followed inSeptember, announcing that “India had already emerged asan IT superpower” (Joshi 2001:176). In thus “emerging,” In-dia was also throwing off the lingering burden of coloniza-tion: “For India, the rise of Information Technology is an op-portunity to overcome historical disabilities and once againbecome the master of its own national destiny” (Vittal andMahalingam 2001:110). Paradoxically, though, India’s gain-ing control of its national destiny still meant measuring itsprogress according to standards established elsewhere. AsRajesh Jain—a man sometimes called India’s first “dot-combillionaire”16—told the press, “It’s our chance to catch upwith the rest of the world” (Minwalla and Khan 1997).

Thanks to ICTs, all Indians could inhabit both the samespace as each other (true nationalism) and the same spaceas the rest of the world (true globalization). India was nolonger to be relegated to the “not yet” category of devel-oping nations. The colonial hangover was lifting. In pre-Internet media policy debates, the colonial legacy had gen-erally been acknowledged in terms of persistent inequality

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between the First and the Third Worlds. But the figure of theInternet absorbed and neutralized the old critique, puttingin its place a mixture of multiculturalism and national psy-chology. Up to the mid-1980s, the political economy of theglobal media system was still a standard feature of main-stream media policy debates. By the 1990s, however, the talkwas all about cultural diversity and overcoming—as thenpresident of India and celebrity nuclear physicist A. P. J. Ab-dul Kalam put it—“a mindset of limited achievement . . . theinertia that has gripped the national psyche, the mindset ofdefeat” (2002:xii, xiii).17

The implicit backstory went something like this. Colo-nialism had imposed an inferiority complex on Indians. Af-ter Independence, a misguided “socialist” policy of importsubstitution had built a defensive wall around India pre-cisely at the moment when she should fearlessly have re-claimed her ancient stature on the global stage. The wallhad not only excused mediocrity and complacency, but ithad also rendered Indians opaque to themselves by depriv-ing them of the self-actualizing recognition that an “open”relation to world markets would have ensured. The ICT rev-olution looked set to blast through this wall and thus to freethe “trapped energies” and “suppressed initiative” (Kalam2002:xvi) that had hobbled India for so long.

This was not, it seemed, just another installment ofthe humiliating game in which the Global North alwaysmoved the finish line just before India could cross it. ICTshad, apparently, rebooted history; the old indexes no longer

counted. In emerging as an ICT superpower, India wasnot only laying claim to a seat at the global table but itwas also reclaiming its ancient crown as the original ad-vanced knowledge society, source of the earliest innova-tions in science, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy.After centuries of humiliation at foreign hands, as Mumbaie-entrepreneur Alok Kejriwal put it to me, the ICT boom“was a release in India, you know? For the first time in ourlives we could figure out that it was something we were goodat. Very honestly, I’ve never been proud of anything fromIndia . . . except the Taj Mahal, for example.”18 The imper-ative now was to stop whining about colonial trauma andseize this small window of historical opportunity: “Indiawas a latecomer to the industrial revolution. It cannot af-ford to miss the knowledge revolution” (Dahlman and Utz2005:131).

Just as ICT4D conjoined ICT entrepreneurship with ru-ral development, so the discourse of e-governance trans-lated government into the terms of corporate manage-ment via ICTs. In 1999, IT secretaries from 32 Indianstates gathered in Bangalore and proclaimed themselvesjointly “committed to producing a one-stop, non-stop, effi-cient, effective, responsive, transparent citizen governancethrough the use of information technology” (Katakam1999). The discourse of e-governance tended to imply thekind of grassroots democratization that one might associatewith new fora of political deliberation and accountability.But, substantially, it tended toward a managerial ideal of

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heightened efficiency that, if anything, suggested not somuch a transformation as a transcendence of politics. N. Vi-jayadita, director general of the National Informatics Centre(NIC),19 argued that e-governance would “enable and em-power the individual to perform tasks without going directlyto the bureaucracy” (Biswas 2001). “The only people com-plaining,” exulted another commentator, “will be superfat-ted bureaucrats and lethargic politicians rendered increas-ingly irrelevant by the spreading web of information” (Timesof India 2000).

Certainly e-governance drew on a neoliberal lexicon.The shift from government to governance indexed an ear-lier attempt to bring transparency to corporate account-ing following a series of crises in the business world dur-ing the late 1980s. This paradigm was subsequently takenup by the NGO and nonprofit sectors (Jayal and Pai 2001;Ryfman 2007). Moving away from a single-minded focus onshareholder value (profitability), the new governance idiomseemed applicable to social issues because of its emphasison negotiating multiple “stakeholder” interests. At the sametime, both its authority and its ontology were based on afundamentally neoliberal commitment to market solutions:“Helped by the big IT vendors, governments all over theworld are realizing that by applying much the same tech-nologies and principles that are fuelling the e-business rev-olution, they can achieve a similar transformation” (Joshi2001:160).

Markets are, in the eyes of both their celebrants andtheir critics, machines of equivalence; they enable the com-mensuration of incommensurates. Nowhere was the de-sire for commensuration more palpable than in the boomin public–private partnerships (PPPs). ICT4D was all aboutPPP, and the alignment of state and market interests via ICTproduced PR dividends for all concerned. E-governance al-lowed governments to look as though they were conform-ing to international standards (in management argot, “bestpractices”) of administrative efficiency and service deliverywhile tackling corruption. And ICT4D lent ICT corporationsa humanitarian aura as a kind of side benefit of scouting outnew markets. In Karsten Ronit and Volker Schneider’s terseformulation, “Private actors’ self-interested behaviour mayproduce positive externalities” (1999:244).

Governments needed corporate funds to expand in-frastructure. And corporations needed governments to fa-cilitate commercial access to this same infrastructure.20

In practice, unsurprisingly, the relationship between thepublic and private partners within any particular PPP wasoften fractious. Transnational deals, particularly commu-nications infrastructure projects like the aforementionedSankhya Vahini, were often subject to security concerns.Projects approved by particular politicians would often bescrapped by their successors (Best 2005; Schwittay 2008).And, at the delivery end, customers often brought their ownpresuppositions regarding government versus commercial

offerings to their encounters with projects (Kuriyan et al.2008). Structurally, too, PPPs were often troubled by inher-ent contradictions. For governments, consumer citizenshipstill, in principle, had to be absolutely inclusive. Unlike mar-keters of consumer goods, “the government cannot chooseits customers. The services it provides must be for every-one” (Joshi 2001:161). On the private-sector side, “a multi-national corporation is not a government” (Dunn and Ya-mashita 2003:54), and corporate players with e-inclusiveambitions were careful to insist that they were absolutelynot engaged in philanthropy.

At the peak of the hype cycle, it was in many waysthe figure of the Internet that held this combustible com-pound together. As a kind of technological materializationof the market itself, the Internet could appear as a universalfield of equivalence, a network capable of absorbing and ex-changing all needs, values, and objects (Castells 1996). De-spite the structural and ethical contradictions that were al-ways latent in the public–private clinch, it was as if ICTs,with the Internet functioning as a kind of emblematic short-hand, provided a scene of projection in which an open-ended assemblage of interests—governmental, corporate,nongovernmental, activist—could imagine a common fu-ture and a common language. In this sense, the Internet wasmore than a technology; it was a metamedium. In Gill’s typ-ically epochal words: “Industrial technology was essentiallysectoral: its defining inventions like the steam engine, in-ternal combustion engine and the electric motor were con-fined to special areas of application. IT operates across theboard: it is entirely universal in its application” (2004:279).

The figure of the Internet as the universal mediatorhas by now become a cliche. But how did computers, ofall things, become “appropriate technologies” for rural de-velopment in India? How did it become possible for AshokKhosla, chairman of the Development Alternatives Group,to say, “For the first time ever, there is convergence be-tween what the poor need and what digital technologymakes possible” (Jishnu et al. 2001)? The idea that digitalhi-tech was relevant in the largely agrarian environment ofIndia’s half million villages was by no means self-evidenteven at the turn of the millennium. In the words of oneBangladesh-based commentator,

An area that has to be addressed, particularly where theinternational donor community is involved, relates tothe mind-set that “appropriate technology” is neces-sarily “low technology.” It is fashionable to design er-gonomic rickshaws and better spinning wheels. Whenwe talk of internet or IT there is a feeling that it is in-appropriate for poor people and cannot have a role in“poverty alleviation.” [Alam 1999]

The question, then, is not only about how computersbecame recognizable as “appropriate technologies” for

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rural development but also, by extension, about whatneeded to happen so that when, for example, the villagecouncil in Bellandur decided to buy itself a computer, its ac-tion could be taken as portending a new age.

Appropriate technology?

The beautiful balloon of ICT4D was so buoyant in part be-cause it seemed to have absorbed and surpassed the wholepostwar history of development communication debates.Broadly speaking, this history can be summarized in di-alectical terms. Thesis: the universalizing top-down tech-nology transfer model of the 1950s and 1960s (Lerner 1958;Rogers 1962; Schramm 1964). Antithesis: the bottom-upforegrounding of indigenous media in the 1970s and 1980s(Dissanayake 1985; Parmar 1977; Ranganath 1980). Synthe-sis: the emergence of the neoliberal equation that, begin-ning in the 1980s, sought to render the earlier oppositionirrelevant by means of the would-be universality of the mar-ket. Like all syntheses, this one produced its own imma-nent antithesis: a critique of the neoliberal information-as-commodity model that insisted that information was akind of natural resource to which everyone should have eq-uitable access (Schiller 1986; Wadekar 1988).21 One mightsay, then, that the key dialectical opposition of the 1980swas between a neoliberal technocratic discourse of the “in-formation society” and an activist–leftist commitment tothe “communication society.” This opposition found its ide-

ological sublation in the 1990s with the global diffusionof the Internet,22 which both absorbed and surpassed thedebate of the 1980s by suggesting that the Internet couldbe a medium of both top-down information services andbottom-up communication flows.

How did all this look in India? All India Radio (AIR) ini-tiated agricultural broadcasts as early as the 1930s, with asignificant post-Independence expansion during the 1950sand 1960s. The aim was solidly pedagogical: to inculcatemodernized farming practices, functional literacy, and—most generally—Jawaharlal Nehru’s cherished “scientifictemper” (Rao 1983). Ford Foundation funding, along withequipment from Germany and the United States, enabledtentative initiatives in Delhi-area development TV broad-casts during the late 1960s (Banerjee 1981). The Indianculmination of the top-down version of development com-munication was undoubtedly the much-discussed Satel-lite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) of 1975–76, which used a satellite in stationary orbit 36,000 kilo-meters above Kenya to beam educational programmingto receivers in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Mad-hya Pradesh, Orissa, and Rajasthan and, from there, on tosome 2,500 villages.23 Technologically pathbreaking thoughit was, SITE was deemed a failure from a developmentstandpoint. Its centralized programming often seemed atodds with local needs and idioms, and although the satel-lite had enabled a new degree of direct broadcasting to largeswathes of the subcontinent, villagers often had no access

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to the inputs and infrastructure they would have needed toput the information to use.

Even before SITE, more localized activist experimentswith indigenous media had been conducted by the likes ofRajive Jain at the Centre for the Development of Instruc-tional Technology (CENDIT), founded in 1972. CENDIT wasa pioneer in the transition from the long-standing prac-tice of screening educational films in rural areas (whichwent back to the very earliest interwar years) to encour-aging local communities to make their own videos.24 Fora decade, beginning in 1975, a local SITE spinoff in KhedaDistrict, Gujarat, was run as a collaboration between theSpace Applications Center (SAC) and the Ahmedabad di-vision of Indian state television (Doordarshan [DD]). Thisprize-winning Kheda Communication Project brought tele-vision producers and social scientists into collaborationwith villagers but ultimately collapsed under the pressureof the national expansion of commercially supported enter-tainment television in the mid-1980s (Banerjee 1981; Dogra1980; Menon 1985).25

Networked computers were in the first instanceadopted to enhance government efficiency. Starting in 1977,the NIC set up an intranet connecting various departmentsof the central government in New Delhi. This was even-tually expanded until, by 1989, every state capital exceptKohima (Nagaland) was linked.26 Among developmentcommunication activists, the possibility of using com-puter networks for more radically participatory forms ofinformation exchange was, by the late 1970s and early1980s, a significant strand of the project–debate knownas the New World Information and Communication Order(NWICO).27 Key issues here included U.S. cultural imperial-ism in the domain of intellectual property, global inequitiesin the distribution of technical expertise, and the lack ofnon-Western-language computing interfaces. Nevertheless,throughout the 1980s, computers remained far outside anymainstream Indian conception of appropriate technologiesfor development communication. It is true that Prime Min-ister Rajiv Gandhi (1984–89) dreamed of connecting everyvillage via the NIC, the better to facilitate the decentral-ization of decision making in the name of panchayati raj(village council rule). But the model of information flowthat informed this ambition was still resolutely top-down,with the village pradhan (headman) punching questionsinto a large terminal under the banyan tree at the cen-ter of the village and receiving government-authorized and-authorizing graphs and tables in response.28

Under the Nehruvian scheme, electronics were catego-rized as capital rather than consumer goods, which meantthat their production was aimed at securing national self-sufficiency (under conditions of import substitution) andlargely geared toward the needs of the state (Gill 2004).29

All the main departments formed to oversee electronicswere public-sector units: the Indian Telephone Industry

(est. 1948), Bharat Electronics Limited (est. 1954), Instru-mentation Limited (est. 1965), and the Electronics Corpora-tion of India Limited (est. 1967). Research and developmentwas undertaken either by these units or within governmentministries like Defence or Telecommunications. The Elec-tronics Commission, a government body, formulated policyand the prime minister was cabinet minister for electron-ics. Only in the early to mid-1980s, with the personal com-puter revolution, did computers slowly begin moving intothe Indian consumer sector.30 Around the same time, off-shore software development centers in Bangalore, Chennai,and Hyderabad, having achieved autonomy from hardwareproduction in the 1970s, witnessed the very earliest stagesof the boom that would make ICTs central to India’s globalimage by the late 1990s (Sood 2003).

Meanwhile, worldwide media policy debates had crys-tallized around the opposition between “information” and“communication” (Zehle 2007). The term information soci-ety was initially popularized by sociologist Daniel Bell’s TheComing of Post-Industrial Society (1973), in which it indexeda shift in the social basis of advanced capitalism. By the1980s, however, the term had been absorbed into a neolib-eral technocratic discourse that marked itself off against thesocial-justice orientation of those who spoke of the “com-munication society” (O Siochru 2004). In the early 1980s,personal computers became available as aspirational con-sumer goods. Meanwhile, UNESCO launched the Interna-tional Program for the Development of Communicationsin 1981 and the United Nations General Assembly declared1983 World Communication Year.

In India, Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministership gavemarket-friendly technocracy a boost and moved charis-matic entrepreneurs like the “America-returned” engineerSatyen “Sam” Pitroda into positions of influence. Pitroda’sgreat legacy would turn out to be the network of long-distance telephone booths whose bright yellow-and-blacksignage still dots the length and breadth of India today.31

But he was also a market evangelist when it came to infor-mation, as he explained to a journalist in the year of RajivGandhi’s defeat and his own fall from grace: “Informationis becoming a product, creating a market and providing aservice. In some countries 50 percent of the people are en-gaged in this activity. I find that in India we have great ideasbut fail in implementation. There is no sound informationbase” (Times of India 1989). Such language was anathemato those who continued into the 1990s to insist that the pol-itics of media in the Global South could not be pursued ona neoliberal basis. Thus, for instance, A. R. Sethi, deputy li-brarian at Jawarharlal Nehru University, observed,

Whereas in the West, information is treated as a com-modity, to be bought and sold, subject to the rules ofthe market, in developing countries’ perception infor-mation needs to be harnessed for the complex task of

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nation building and socio-economic transformation,that is, essentially for development purposes. For us,information is a social resource, a social right and a so-cial function. Access to information is the right of everyhuman being. [1994]

Sethi wrote these words as the possibilities of the Inter-net were first entering mainstream public discourse; bythis time, his brand of Third World particularism waswidely mocked as archaic, even dangerous to India’s futurestanding—the outmoded plaint of “Internet puritans” and“academicians” who would restrict the web to “a means oflibrary browsing and message passing” (Balasubramanian1994).

Indeed, part of the Internet’s magic was to make it ap-pear that old distinctions had become irrelevant, that ev-erything and everyone could now occupy a single space.In the old pre-Internet days, as in the Kheda Communica-tion Project, limited airtime had to be divided into “devel-opment” content and regular programming. Indeed, this di-vision was one of the reasons the Kheda project collapsedas airtime became an increasingly lucrative resource in acontext of booming advertising revenues. On the Internet,conversely, not only could an infinite plurality of contentbe accommodated simultaneously but Indians were nowalso able to reach beyond the national time–space of de-velopment (in which they were always “behind” the GlobalNorth) and into a global informational ecumene (in whichthey could experience simultaneity with the “developed”world).

Critics from within and without

Of course, the beautiful balloon had many critics. As I noteat the beginning of this article, their objections tended tocluster into two broad camps: those who criticized ICT4D“from within” and those who attacked it “from without.”

Many of those who accepted the basic terms of ICT4Ddiscourse nevertheless challenged its specific claims by mo-bilizing sobering numbers. For instance, for all the headytalk about Indian call centers taking over the world, theIndian share of the global software services market was,in 2002, no more than 1.5 or 2 percent and of softwareproducts a measly 0.2 percent (Gill 2004; Kapur 2002). A2003 figure of $7.2 billion in Indian software exports wasstill smaller than migrant worker remittances ($8.1 billion),mainly from the Persian Gulf (Bidwai 2003). In 2005, ICTrepresented significant chunks of Indian exports (25 per-cent) and GDP (4 percent) but only employed two-tenthsof one percent of India’s total workforce (Radhakrishnan2007). Even this small fraction was a bit of a fiction becauseit largely consisted of ICT-enabled work in call centers,medical-record transcription services, and so on. Within In-dia, the ICT sector stood more or less alone among high-

skill industries in its plausible claim to world-class quality(D’Costa 2006).

There was much concern over the fact that Indiaseemed to be stuck at the low end of the value chain,cheaply executing foreign-designed innovations ratherthan coming up with its own proprietary technologies (Sun-der Rajan 2006; Wade 2002). Certainly the ICT boom hadmade a handful of Indians very rich and very famous.32 Butthe majority of Indian ICT workers were still, as one of myinformants put it, “the coolies of the IT world” (cf. Upadhya2006, 2007). As Alok Kejriwal of Contests2Win lamented,“We all know that we’re very intelligent, but where the hellhas that intelligence gone? Where has it been applied? . . .

There’s a lot of engineering talent that is suitable to do thisIT, to harvest this IT revolution. But I’m sure you know thatthe value addition we do to the IT side is still very, very min-imal. We don’t write, we don’t create. We still work as bod-ies.”33 Perhaps the colonial hangover was still in place afterall. The new king or emperor might be American and comedressed in jeans and sneakers, but all the Indian dignitariesstill fought for favor at his Delhi darbar (court). When BillGates visited New Delhi in September 2000, chief ministersfrom a slew of Indian states, each claiming to be more tech-savvy than the next, lined up to persuade the Global Nerdto be their “software partner.” A contemporary account de-scribes a rickshaw driver escaping the melee in the streetto gain a better view from the roof of the IT ministry build-ing, the Electronic Niketan, and exclaiming, “Koi gora rajaaa raha hai” [Some white king is coming] (Thomas 2000).

Meanwhile back on the ground, in the world of ICT4Dprojects, things seemed to be running out of steam. TheGyandoot project in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh, set up 39telecenters–infokiosks to serve 500 villages (Tiwari andSharmistha 2008). By 2003, seven of these centers had 35visitors a day and six were nonoperative because of bro-ken phone lines. The rest had very few visitors and strug-gled with intermittent electricity as well as with the real-ity that villagers either did not know or did not care aboutthe service (Sarkar 2003). My own impressionistic experi-ence of the HP–Chandrababu Naidu i-communities projectin Kuppam, Andhra Pradesh, was similar. In the summer of2002, I visited a telecenter in the main town there where fourcomputers lay largely idle, gathering dust under tube lights.The proprietor reported daily traffic of 10 to 15 users—hardly the unstoppable surge of “trapped energies” and“suppressed initiative” that President Kalam’s book, thenwidely available at every streetside bookstall, had solicited.Pornography, said the manager, was a major draw, withyoung men visiting in groups, commenting and laughingtogether. For the computers to be profitable, they wouldhave to be in constant use for eight hours a day. Businesswas sure to pick up, the proprietor said (perhaps partly toplease my traveling companion, who was from HP), but hewas not able to say how or why.

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In a village in nearby Gudupalli mandal (subdistrict),we stopped at a tiny telecenter, where two young opera-tors presided over a single computer and a photocopier.Portraits of a beaming Chandrababu Naidu graced the palegreen walls. Here, no more than one or two people walkedin on a typical day. Out of every 30 rupees (approximately$0.60) that the operators could charge for an hour online,27 would have to be paid directly to the government In-ternet service provider. In Gudupalli, as in Kuppam town,the only moneymaker was the photocopier, backed up inGudupalli by a small trade in stationery items. Laughinglydenying that his venture into the infokiosk business hadanything to do with status—although also acknowledgingthat it was likely to make him more marriageable—the Kup-pam proprietor explained that he had taken up the business“to try something new,” and that if it did not work out hewould most likely return to farming his family’s land. Thetwo young operators in Gudupalli figured on finding factorywork in the city as an alternative.34

In the national press, the attack on ICT4D “from with-out” largely took up a moralizing stance of objection to thevery idea that ICTs could count as appropriate developmenttechnologies. To be sure, in a country with such starkly pal-pable inequalities, it was never difficult to call attention toeverything that the glistening envelope of the e-future oc-cluded: crumbling urban infrastructure (not least in capi-tals of the Indian ICT business like Bangalore and Hyder-abad), persistent poverty and illiteracy, and chronically lag-

ging primary education. To many, the claim that the Inter-net was the infrastructure of the future seemed fundamen-tally misconceived: “The laws of physics do not allow IT tosubstitute [for] the physical movement of goods by a ‘vir-tual’ movement. A lightning-fast information network willnot in itself help achieve faster and cheaper transport. Bet-ter roadways and railways will” (Konana and Balasubrama-nian 2002).

ICT4D-style village computerization was, of course, aneasy target for politicians seeking to capitalize on pop-ulist indignation against the urban consuming classes. IfChandrababu Naidu was the McKinsey-speaking laptoppolitician, then the former chief minister of Bihar, LalooPrasad Yadav, was the charismatic grassroots populist: bare-chested, staff-wielding, earth-tongued. In November 2000,the Times of India staged a face-off over the relevance ofICTs between Yadav and Karnataka’s then chief minister, S.M. Krishna, a man very much in the Naidu mold. Krishna’scontribution was utterly forgettable. But Yadav, as usual, letrip:

Yeh IT-YT kya hai? [What is this “IT” stuff?] The use ofIT is confined to the hi-fi log [“hi-fi people”—i.e., eliteconsumers]. The masses have no access to it and gainno benefit from it. Agar yeh sach nahin hai, to Chan-drababu Naidu ke highly successful IT Pradesh meinkisan atmahatya kyon kar rahe hain? [If this is not true,then why are farmers in Chandrababu Naidu’s “highlysuccessful” IT state committing suicide?]35

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With his usual flair for topicality, Yadav drove home hispoint with a reference to the electoral troubles in Floridathat were at that moment reducing the very superpowerthat certain Indians liked to see as the model of world classexcellence to the ignominy of manual labor:

Indeed, if IT is as important as it is made out to be, whyare they having to resort to manual counting of votes inthe US? Where are all their supercomputers? . . . Peopleshould know that India is being treated as a huge mar-ket. Our shops are being flooded with multinationalgoods—butter, milk, tomato sauce, you name it. Imag-ine, even salt [which, following Mahatma Gandhi’s leg-endary Salt March of 1930, had become a key symbol ofnational self-reliance] might be imported from foreigncountries! And all this is being done with the help of IT-backed electronic media. In the process our dairies andindigenous industry are being banned. Do you needIT to tell you these simple things? [Yadav and Krishna2000]

Besides, despite declining prices, computers were still fartoo expensive for ordinary Indians. An American mightspend 12 days’ worth of income on a computer, a Chi-nese consumer four months’ worth. But for an Indian at theheight of the ICT boom, a computer still cost two to threeyears’ worth of average income (Bidwai 2000; Gill 2004). Atthe millennium, Indian computer penetration was still atless than a fifth of the world average.36

And then there were those striking stories of whatKeniston (2002b) has called “ICT Potemkin villages,” sto-ries that dramatized the suspicion that all this ICT4Dstuff was just a smoke screen for the same old corruptionand neglect. Most notably, during his March 2000 trip toIndia, Bill Clinton had graced the community of Naila inRajasthan with a visit. According to a contemporary report,“On March 23, the world’s most powerful man came vis-iting this sleepy village near Jaipur. And in honour of BillClinton, the villagers were treated to a glimpse of com-puters and a bagful of dreams. Six months down the line,Naila is still struggling to get a bit of water out of the hand-pumps in the village” (Kaushal 2000). The village coun-cil was still waiting for a telephone connection, electricitywas restricted to three hours a day (Guha Ray 2001), and“women dairy co-operative workers from Dobhlai village,who were made to set up a temporary computerized of-fice here to impress Clinton, have returned without leavinga trace behind” (Kaushal 2000). Blissfully ignorant of thesehollow theatrics, Clinton went on to cite the “Naila model”in several speeches that year as an inspirational illustrationof how unexpectedly appropriate information technologycould be in the poorest parts of the world.

Nor was e-governance necessarily adopted with muchmore sincerity at the top. The managing director of an ICTsolutions company in Mumbai explained to me that the cor-

porate ICT sector had basically seen e-governance as an op-portunity to tap into government funds after the worldwidetech boom collapsed. Politicians saw it as a way to leverageinfluence with their superiors, and press reports had bu-reaucrats playing solitaire on their new computers ratherthan stepping up productivity (Mhasawade 1999). Even ifwork was being done on computers, this was in itself noguarantee of efficiency. As Gill summarized the situation,“Work in the Central Secretariat is being increasingly com-puterized, but a file still passes through nine levels before itlands on the table of the minister” (2004:272).

Some questioned the technofetishism of the newparadigm. Could social problems be made amenableto purely technical solutions (Schwittay 2008)? If rurale-governance software like that used in the Gyandootproject formatted all citizen complaints into 30 pregivencategories, then was it not simply reproducing an existing,reified structure of governmentality (Sood 2002)? Was notthe tendency to see ICTs only as neutral tools obscuring thecomplex ways in which entire social ontologies were beingbuilt into system architecture (Reidenberg 1998)? Perhapsinformation flows were actually being maximized at thecost of a sustained consideration of what equitable commu-nication might really mean (Hamelink 2002).

Others took direct aim at the neoliberal logic underly-ing ICT4D and e-governance. Merridy Wilson (2003) notesthat although World Bank documents might distinguishthe concept of a “knowledge society” from the more nar-rowly neoliberal-sounding “information economy,” policyrecommendations still remained geared toward “growingthe knowledge economy.” Jan Nederveen Pieterse expressesthe situation in terms only marginally updated from thepolitical-economy critique that was forced out of main-stream policy debates in the 1980s: “ICT4D is a strategicpart of ICT expansion: ICT4D is digital capitalism lookingSouth—to growing middle classes, rising educational levels,vast cheap labour pools, and yet difficult regulatory envi-ronments” (Sreekumar and Rivera-Sanchez 2008:160).

Emergence: Ideology and potential

All these objections are valid and important. And yet some-thing is missing. First, neither the critiques from within northose from without are actually much interested in think-ing about the specific, perhaps unexpected, ways a mediummight remediate a local context. In either case, the parame-ters of what “development” means and what “developmentneeds” might be are pretty much assumed. The critics in-ternal to the ICT4D paradigm take for granted that ICTs areappropriate to that project and those needs, whereas the ex-ternal critics take for granted that they are not. Nor shouldone assume that critiquing the appropriateness of comput-ers for rural development is an exclusively left–activist po-sition. None other than Bill Gates himself, a month after

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visiting India, told the Creating Digital Dividends confer-ence in October 2000 that Africa needed food, electricity,and health care before it needed computers. A few yearslater, in 2005, even the Economist was proclaiming that “thedebate over the digital divide is founded on a myth . . . acomputer is not useful if you have no food or electricity andcannot read” (Ginsburg 2008:293).

These statements seem so obvious as to require no fur-ther interpretation. No one will contest, presumably, thatfood, power, and health care are baseline requirements forhuman thriving. But the insistence that computers comelater, as it were, nevertheless also works to perpetuatethe assumption that the appropriateness of a technologyshould be evaluated in terms of a hierarchy of needs thatcan be known in advance. What if the “truth” of a mediumis equally to be sought in its ability to potentiate a set of so-cial relations, to actualize social potentials that cannot bespecified ahead of time? What if the power of a mediumis as much performative as it is functional—that is to say,what if it brings about its effects as much through the de-sires people invest in it as through its ability to deliver pre-defined utilities? Stories like that of Naila, the ICT Potemkinvillage, make it seem as if the performative aspect of ICT isall a big game of smoke and mirrors. Here the performanceis utterly “empty”—it is deceptive, it leaves nothing “real”behind. But perhaps the performativity of ICTs can also be“full”—perhaps they can also operate as efficacious sym-bols, in the Levi-Straussian sense.

My own brief experience in Bellandur was alreadyenough to orient my thoughts in this direction. In someways, to be sure, Bellandur was unusual. It was not, to be-gin with, the site of a project implemented by outsiders. Thepanchayat bought a computer for its own purposes in 1998;subsequently, outsiders recognized something exciting inthis and latched on. Nevertheless, Jagannath and his asso-ciates retained a kind of originary ownership over the situa-tion that was quite different from those projects in whichsome NGO–corporate–governmental combine had set uptelecenters as an experiment in microentrepreneurship.

In the years following my visit, I read up on Bel-landur only to find that commentaries tended to fallinto two stereotypical modes, echoing the old top-down–bottom-up opposition that structured the postwar historyof development-communication policy debates. On thetop-down side, there was a solidly neoliberal narrative: Bel-landur as beneficiary of corporate-led trickle-down fromthe Indian ICT sector. Shekhar Gupta of the Indian Express,for example, wrote that the Bangalore Development Au-thority’s decision to construct an “IT corridor” outside thecity had been a boon to surrounding villagers, who werenow sitting on a veritable gold mine of rapidly appreciat-ing real estate. In this story, corporate expansion was the vi-tal source of local change. Jagannath had, as I note above,lambasted this IT corridor as a “concrete jungle.” But Gupta

wrote, “Mr. Jagannath hopes that the IT companies plan-ning to set up shop on the IT corridor will further the vil-lage’s technology adoption programme” (2004).

Others, telling a bottom-up story, reported that, by wayof facilitating the IT corridor, the state government had al-lowed Bangalore-based ICT corporations to buy up land be-tween Bellandur and the city at concessionary prices. Vil-lagers had, as a result, been forced to move off the land,sell their animals, and in some cases relocate to shanties.In protest, Jagannath had traveled to Delhi to confront leg-endary Infosys founder N. R. Narayana Murthy at an an-nual summit. With Jagannath as David to Murthy’s Goliath,the land deal is said to have fallen apart (Iype 2005). Later,Jagannath led a successful campaign in the Karnataka HighCourt to stop the Bangalore sewage works from dumpingtoxic materials into Bellandur Lake (Mathew 2006).

These are both archetypal stories. Their emplotmentserves narrative agendas that are, in a sense, external to Bel-landur itself. They celebrate, respectively, liberalization andgrassroots self-determination. They are also generic in thatthey reveal little about what may be specific to the histori-cal conjuncture of ICT4D itself. Closer to that specificity is athird story told by Compusol, the company that donated itsKannada-language software to Bellandur. Compusol under-stood itself as a broker between global ICT corporations likeIBM or Microsoft and the needs of local communities. Itscritics charged that it was helping to lock rural Indian usersinto expensive proprietary-branded software when open-source solutions were readily available. There is, no doubt,some truth to this, but what interests me about Compu-sol’s story is its reliance on an organic metaphor of emer-gence. Mobilizing e-governance talk, Compusol claimedthat it was facilitating a multistakeholder, iterative, con-sultative “emergent information ecosystem.” This contrastswith what ICT commentator Pratik Kanjilal described as“our usual concept of rural connectivity, in which the gov-ernment can plonk down a PCO [public call office] in everyvillage, plonk down a computer and a modem in every suchPCO, dust its hands off and leave behind a mob of bemusedvillagers grappling with their email” (2003).

In an emergent information ecosystem, though, therecould be no preconceived solutions and no quick fixes. Asa matrix of stakeholders, in which no single actor’s voicewas louder than another’s, the ecosystem generated its ownchallenges and opportunities, to which it was the job ofattentive brokers to respond. Compusol’s Amit Pande re-flected, “We run the risk of having at best time-boundsuccess stories and, at worst, systemic disruptions unlesswe ‘listen’ to the ecosystem, and make sure all linkagesand nodes of this emerging network are taken into con-sideration” (2003). As opposed to the state that “plonkeddown” computers and then walked away, the listeningcorporation–facilitator stayed both present and accessibleto the community that was its customer.

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Supposedly. Obviously, this too is a rampantly ideo-logical discourse. It glibly elides questions of social hier-archy and structural inequality. It blithely assumes thatcommunity needs will be reconcilable with corporate re-quirements, even as considerations of profitability con-stantly interrupt that equation. And if this notion of anemergent information ecosystem takes aim at the one-size-fits-all paternalism of earlier official ICT policy, then it isnot innocent of its own brand of technofetishism. The highmodernist technocratic imaginary assumed that technol-ogy had a universal character that transcended any localparticularities. But the emergent ecosystem model also in-volves a troubling reduction: It makes the media that consti-tute the information network so organic that they becomeessentially indistinguishable from the social relations theyremediate. If the old top-down development communica-tion model was “too distant,” then the ecosystem modelbrings social and media networks into such close proximitythat they collapse into each other, each ideologically natu-ralizing the other.

And yet, for all its egregiousness, there is, it seems tome, an element of truth in this ecosystem model, some-thing that neither the internal nor the external critiques ofICT4D quite capture: namely, the emergent potentials ofa system of mediation. It focuses attention on how mediamay actualize latent (or “virtual”) social potentials, ratherthan simply more or less efficiently enabling predecidedaims and projects. This is something that was missed—orglossed over—both by those who wanted ICT4D to be aboutmore effective delivery of already-existing services and ad-ministration and by those who saw it as a platform for therecognition of already-existing (but underrepresented) cul-tural identities and traditions. Certainly, there is no par-ticular reason to assume that these actualized potentialsshould conform to the expectations of ICT4D enthusiasts:for instance, that the Internet will automatically bring abouta grassroots democratic revolution. Nor will the outcomesnecessarily conform to the predictions of the debunkers:that the computers will either crumble irrelevantly in someshed or, if they are taken up, will only reproduce exist-ing power relations. Being attentive to the emergent po-tentials of a social context undergoing remediation meansrecognizing that transformation often comes masked asrepetition.

Jagannath may have been described in certain quartersas a kind of subaltern hero, facing off against his namesake,the corporate juggernaut. But it quickly became clear to methat Jagannath’s own agenda did not necessarily conform toany activist definition of “progressive.” His vision of whatICT might do for Bellandur was solidly technocratic, andthe information order he was trying to build in the villagewas in many ways premised on long-standing privileges,as already signaled by the housing of the computers in thepanchayat building. Such alignment of ICT4D projects with

established local power structures was, in general, an am-biguous business. On the one hand, it risked simply perpet-uating traditional privileges as elite groups maintained con-trol over the new technology. On the other hand, as JayanThomas (2006) has pointed out, when externally originatedICT4D schemes were able to win the backing of the pan-chayat, local engagement with the scheme also tended tobe more intensive. Some kind of mediation through exist-ing social relations would, in any case, be necessary (Heeks2002).

Jagannath emphasized to me that he belonged to “a po-litical family” in the village. As a member of a privilegedcaste group, he had been elected to the panchayat presi-dency under the “general” category—that is, not as a mem-ber of one of the traditionally disadvantaged groups forwhom “reservations” are secured by law. Jagannath was im-patient with what he saw as the ignorant traditionalism ofthe less privileged. With much eye rolling, Jagannath andone his colleagues recalled the time when an illiterate fe-male farm laborer had been elected president of the pan-chayat. Her inability to read official documents had ren-dered her susceptible, they said, to the kind of corruptionthat the two computers were now apparently eradicating.Armed with a stamp and an inkpad, working in the fields,she had been prepared to affix her official authorizationto any document that came with a gratuity of 50 rupees(about $1).

At the same time, it was quite clear to me that Bellan-dur’s recognition as an ICT4D “success story” had broughtabout important realignments in the village’s relation tothe external world. Jagannath had, as noted, been able toparlay his standing as an e-hero into a number of suc-cessful actions on behalf of his constituency. Most im-portantly, it had enabled the village to lessen its relianceon a state government that, despite its loudly trumpetedcommitment to ICTs, had consistently treated Bellandurwith contempt. Jagannath and his associates repeatedly ex-pressed their disgust at, and alienation from, the corruptionand hypocrisy of the state authorities.37 S. M. Krishna, thechief minister, may have talked e-governance and ICT4Dat every available (photo) opportunity, but hardly any ofthe e-mails that the panchayat had sent to the state ad-ministration had received a reply. The state IT secretaryhad, it was true, managed to visit Bellandur a couple ofyears earlier and had on that occasion given all kinds of“assurances”—free Internet connections and so on—butnone of it had materialized. Now that Bellandur was mak-ing waves on international lists of ICT4D projects, curiousvisitors were pouring in from other parts of India and allover the world: Malaysia, South Africa, Europe, the UnitedStates, even Pakistan. But still, the chief minister had notbothered to travel the few miles from Bangalore, prefer-ring, according to Jagannath, to hobnob with the corporatebigwigs.

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Increasingly, because of his connections with nonstateentities, many of them transnational, Jagannath was in aposition to carve out relations of patronage and influencethat challenged the authority of the state and even the na-tional governments. In this, he was, albeit at a differentscale, operating in a manner analogous to ChandrababuNaidu in his capacity as chief minister of Andhra Pradesh:using the charisma of ICT to open up access to transna-tional resource flows (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001). Again,one should by no means romanticize Jagannath’s idealism.What he called “standing on our own legs” was a form oflocal empowerment that did not necessarily extend even tothe other villages in the same district. During my visit, I satin on a meeting between members of the Bellandur grampanchayat and a visiting district official whose own homedistrict, Bijapur, was much less affluent than Bellandur. Hisrepeated, rather plaintive queries as to whether the Bellan-dur effect could be replicated in a less affluent village werestudiously ignored.

If Bellandur was an emergent information ecosystem—and I believe that it would not be inaccurate to describeit as such—then it was also a contested space. The milkylanguage used by Compusol to describe this apparentlyegalitarian space of stakeholder collaboration looked rathergrittier in practice. It was a space of potentiality andtransformation, albeit one whose outcomes were by nomeans necessarily aligned with corporate, state, or NGOdiscourses. To a certain extent, Jagannath and his Bellandurcollaborators had been able to turn ICTs to functional use:collecting new taxes, digitizing records, and so on. But in animportant sense, the benefit they realized was also perfor-mative. By enacting an ICT4D scenario, they were able touse the charisma of ICTs to harness the desire of externalothers and to convert this desire and attention into localaction-potential. Although there were certainly limitationsto this action potential within the field of ICT—Jagannathand his fellow villagers were, for example, not about tobe given jobs with Bangalore-area ICT companies—thecharisma of ICT had the potential to “bleed” efficacy intoadjacent domains of social practice.

This might also be a way back into Jagannath’s storyabout the televised village assembly, the meeting thatproved so transparent that it ceased to exist. For decades,the politics of self-determination in the name of develop-ment had been about a repetitive staging of the overcomingof opacity: making things more transparent through newtechnologies and new dispensations, again and again. AsJay David Bolter and Richard Grusin so usefully point out,however, the will to transparency and immediacy is alwayspursued by means of mediation: “Although each mediumpromises to reform its predecessors by offering a more im-mediate or authentic experience, the promise of reform in-evitably leads us to become aware of the new medium asa medium” (1999:19). Perhaps, then, one could read Jagan-

nath’s story as an allegory of the limits of the transparencyparadigm. Perhaps it suggests that whereas the formal lan-guage of politics promotes talk about visibility, recognition,representation, and transparency, there is another domainof efficacy that is about harnessing the emergent potentialsof sociotechnological moments.

This is, of course, a politically ambiguous scenario—not least for those who imagine themselves to be its key“agents” (Jagannath Reddy himself was forced to cede hisleadership of the gram panchayat in 2003 and, at a granderscale, Chandrababu Naidu lost the chief ministership ofAndhra Pradesh in 2004). But I think it is more faithful bothto what I saw in Bellandur and to what I imagine may actu-ally be taking place in thousands of “project sites” aroundthe ICT4D world, even long after the corporations have lostinterest and moved on. Quite clearly, events in Bellandurwould not have been possible without the enormous, globalinvestment of desire in the beautiful balloon of ICT4D. Thischarismatic moment, at the peak of the hype cycle, openedup new possibilities. As the moment passed, and gravity be-gan to win, disillusionment set in and ICT4D started look-ing like just another case of overexcitement. Seen from a dif-ferent angle, ICT4D has not so much imploded as becomenormalized; these days, for instance, the once flamboyantlylow-tech Laloo Prasad Yadav is an active blogger with a soft-ware engineer son-in-law. What I hope to have suggestedin this article is that the erstwhile beautiful balloon, havingapparently moved from hype to habit, remains more enig-matic than it might appear. Much of the air that has goneout of it was, in any case, stale: the exhaust fumes of na-tionalism, paternalist politics, and profit seeking that keptthe official ideology of ICT4D afloat for a few years. And yet,even these stuffy dreams, as they unspool through new ma-chines in old places, release potentials—potentials that mayyet surprise those most heavily invested in them.

Notes

Acknowledgments. The research on which this article is basedwas made possible by the Committee on Southern Asian Studiesand the Marion R. and Adolph J. Lichtstern Fund at the Universityof Chicago. For support and critical responses, I would like to thankItty Abraham, Dominic Boyer, Francis Cody, Don Donham, ShantiKumar, Eli Thorkelson, friends and colleagues at the University ofToronto and the University of Texas at Austin, and two anonymousreviewers for American Ethnologist. Some of their generous com-ments have made their way into this text; others await fuller elabo-ration in the larger work of which this article is a part.

1. Faye Ginsburg (2008) notes how digital-divide discourse per-sists in placing the underdeveloped object of development in a re-lation of allochrony (Fabian 1983) vis-a-vis the developed subjectof development (see also Schech 2002 and Wilson 2003).

2. Even though IT (information technology) is the more widelyused abbreviation, I use ICT (information and communicationtechnology) throughout this article, as I feel it better indexes thepoint of intersection between the corporate IT sector and thedevelopment-oriented discourse of ICT4D.

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3. Despite the withering of the boom, the sector’s growth contin-ued into the first decade of the new millennium. The Indian ICTmarket grew from $1.73 billion in 1994–95 to $19.9 billion in 2003–04 and to $58.7 billion in 2008–09 (India Brand Equity Foundation2010).

4. By comparison, the BSE overall rose by 28 percent during thissame period.

5. The Bellandur gram panchayat represents an area of five vil-lages, comprising around ten thousand people, among them Bel-landur village itself.

6. The cost of this device in 1998 was about Rs 70,000 ($1,800). Bysome accounts, the purchase was a collective village project; otherssuggest that it was driven and shouldered by the wealthier familiesin the community.

7. “You will not be able to stay home, brother/You will not be ableto plug in, turn on, and cop out.”

8. I use the term remediate here to suggest that social ordersare always already structures of mediation. Consequently, the en-counter that is often imagined in social theory as a society–mediainterface might better be theorized as a dynamic relation betweentwo or more structures of mediation (Mazzarella 2004; cf. Bolterand Grusin 1999).

9. I discuss the aesthetic politics of such village computertableaux in Mazzarella 2006.

10. The apparently automatic egalitarian effects of ICTs wereoften stressed in these reports. The same article reported on aninfokiosk project in Embalam, Pondicherry: “Ironically, the lowercastes and the menstruating women continue to be shut out at oneof the temple’s two entrances. The other entrance leading to themakeshift information booth allows one and all to access informa-tion” (Biswas 2001).

11. On the former, see Media Lab Asia n.d. The MassachusettsInstitute of Technology (MIT) pulled out within a couple of yearsbecause of disagreements with the Maharashtra state government(Best 2005). Since MIT’s withdrawal in 2003, it has continued tofunction under the direction of the Government of India as a fund-ing body for domestic projects. Sankhya Vahini, an ambitious jointventure between the Government of India and IUNet (a subsidiaryof Carnegie Mellon University) to put in place a communicationsbackbone, was announced in January 2000 but cancelled in April2002 after parliamentary resistance to—ironically—a lack of trans-parency about the terms of the deal.

12. See M S Swaminathan Research Foundation n.d. AkshayJoshi reports: “Scanning the demographic trends, Swaminathansays with more than half the population under the age of 21, farm-ing has to become intellectually stimulating, through IT-based pre-cision farming” (2001:276).

13. The Simputer ran on open-source software, boasted text-to-speech capability in five languages, a smart card capacity, theability to receive downloaded satellite radio communications, atouch screen to bypass illiteracy, and a case designed to with-stand rain, dust, and heat. Significant as an early example of IndianICT4D technology innovation, the device was used in various pilotprojects in 2003–04 but failed to live up to sales projections.

14. Drishtee.com’s Gyandoot is a good example of this kind ofproject. It began in 1999 in Dhar District, Madhya Pradesh, whereit connected local infokiosks, run on an entrepreneurial basis, tothe services of the district administration. Government loans weremade available to operators as start-up capital. Robert HunterWade (2002:447) points out that making government services avail-able for a fee through set-ups like Gyandoot is already interesting;public services should really be free of charge, he argues, but whenpeople are used to paying extortionate bribes, they are unlikely toobject to a much smaller commercial fee.

15. In fact, the discourse of the digital divide obscured as muchas it revealed. Typically, low teledensity (i.e., telemedia connectionsto population ratio) was taken as a straightforward measure of un-derdevelopment. But as Wade observes, the teledensity of so-calleddeveloping countries looks rather different when measured againsttheir proportion of global income: “LDCs [Less Developed Coun-tries] now have a bigger share of world televisions (61 percent), tele-phones (25 percent) and Internet connections (28 percent) thantheir share of (current exchange rate) world income (20 percent).The digital divide may now be simply a reflection of the more fa-miliar income divide” (2002:445).

16. Some claim that Jain’s spectacular November 1999 sale of hisIndiaworld.com business to Satyam Infoway (latterly Sify.com) forRs 499 crore ($115 million at the contemporary exchange rate) setoff the final frenzied spiral in the Indian dot-com boom.

17. One sees this transition in the stark difference between theInternational Telecommunication Union’s 1984 report—known asthe Maitland Report—which proposed that a portion of telecomrevenues be set aside for expanding networks in the developingworld, and the 1995 UNESCO report Our Cultural Diversity, inwhich any political-economic analysis appeared entirely irrelevant(O Siochru 2004).

18. Interview with Alok Kejriwal, Mumbai, December 2001. AsCEO of Contests2Win.com, Kejriwal managed to ride out the ICTbust.

19. Nowadays, the NIC is a subdivision of the Government of In-dia’s Ministry of Information Technology.

20. For example, S. S. Gill (2004) points out that the official ambi-tion to move from an Indian teledensity of 4.5 percent in 2002 (withrural areas around the 1 percent mark) to 9.1 percent by 2007 and15 percent by 2010 would require infrastructure investments on theorder of $69 billion—a figure far in excess of government capac-ities. In fact, private-sector players like Tata, Reliance, and Bhartidid soon move into infrastructure projects, laying fiberoptic cableall over India.

21. Cees Hamelink (2002) notes that the “right to communicate”was posited as a basic human right in 1969 by French media vision-ary Jean D’Arcy.

22. Sublation is a term from Hegelian dialectical philosophy thatrefers to a synthetic moment in which the terms of an earlier oppo-sition are at once preserved and transcended.

23. SITE was a collaboration between NASA and the IndianSpace Research Organisation (ISRO), at a time when relations be-tween the United States and India were strained, not so much be-cause of Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency as because of India’s perceivedalliance with Soviet interests. On the Indian side, the crucial figurewas the visionary scientist Vikram Sarabhai who, working at ISRO,had advocated satellite-based communication since the 1960s(Abraham 1999; Shah 2007).

24. Jain:

Then we actually handed over cameras to the villagers and letthem record what they wanted to; to see what kind of thingsthey were interested in. One of the first things someone didwas, he recorded ten minutes of his cow. For ten minutes hejust shot his cow! That’s what was important to him, that’swhat he wanted to do. And other people watched it, and theyfound it quite interesting. [Alternate Media Times 2000]

25. The Kheda project was awarded a $20,000 prize from UN-ESCO in early 1985 for effectiveness in rural communication, iron-ically enough, just before it was terminated.

26. Proximate Indian precursors to the Internet during the 1980sincluded the United Nations Development Program–supportedERNET, an academic network, and Indonet, launched by the

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Computer Maintenance Corporation to encourage public access todigital information networks.

27. Mattelart 1994, O Siochru 2004, and Tomlinson 1991 containuseful discussions of the rise and fall of UNESCO’s influence onmedia–development policy as well as the shifting contours of theNWICO debate within that larger discussion.

28. “DISNIC [the NIC network] was completely centralized. Dis-trict information needs were assessed and standardized across dis-tricts, as were software design and database specifications” (Bhat-tacharya 2004:15). Although, as noted, state capitals were wired bythe end of the 1980s, the linking of districts was much slower, withonly 238 out of a total of over 600 districts connected by 1989, andonly some of these operational (Sarin 1989). By 1994, the numberhad reached 439 (Seshagiri 1994).

29. This was not in itself unusual in the historical context of de-colonization. And one should remember that even in the late 1980s,many European governments demanded licensing for companieswishing to transmit information across national borders.

30. A new national computer policy was announced in 1984 thatreduced import tariffs on components and peripherals. This was ahuge boost to Indian computer brands—at that point, HCL, Ster-ling, Wipro, and EIKO—that relied on foreign components. And itbrought personal consumer prices crashing down from around Rs1,000,000 (more than $9,000) in 1984 to around Rs 20,000 (about$1,500) in 1987.

31. In 1980, that is to say, prior to Pitroda’s telephone revolution,India had a mere 12,000 public telephones for a population of 700million people. Ninety-seven percent of India’s roughly 600 thou-sand villages had no telephone at all (Pitroda 1993).

32. The list included such celebrities as Sabeer Bhatia, cofounderof Hotmail.com; Vinod Dham, who helped develop the Pentiumprocessor at Intel; and Kanwal Rekhi, who made millions when hesold his company Excelan to Novell.

33. Radhakrishnan in press suggests that this may be changing.34. Chandrababu Naidu was voted out of office in 2004, and by

2006 HP had extracted itself from the Kuppam project altogether.35. Chandrababu Naidu’s Andhra Pradesh advertised a com-

pound growth rate of 80 percent in the ICT sector between 1999and 2002. Meanwhile, the state saw an accelerating immiserationof its rural populations and a decline in public expenditure on agri-culture, even as liberalizers complained about continuing econom-ically “irrational” subsidies (J. Thomas 2006).

36. Computer penetration was, by September 2000, estimated at3.5 per 1,000 Indians (Business Standard 2000). A Mumbai Inter-net professional told me in July 2002 that there was an “installedbase” of seven million computers in the country, of which aroundhalf would have been in corporate offices. As for Internet connec-tions, 2000 alone saw a doubling from just over a million in March—again, recall, in a country of almost a billion people—to just overtwo million in September. By June 2001, on a base of around twomillion actual Internet subscriptions, Avijit Ghosh (2001) reported,something like 5.7 million Indians used the Internet. At the end ofthat year, one of my informants in the business told me that In-dia had reached three million Internet subscriptions and estimatedthat around 13.5 million Indians were online. Recent estimates bythe International Telecommunications Union suggest that some 81million Indians were online as of November 2008 and that therewere 5.28 million broadband Internet connections by the middleof 2009 (Internet World Stats 2010).

37. An honorable exception to this pattern of neglect appears tohave been U. R. Sabapathi, a member of the Karnataka LegislativeAssembly, who facilitated the extension of Compusol’s solution tosimilar projects in Alevuru Gram Panchayat in Udupi District andChikjala Gram Panchayat in Bangalore (Pande and Jois 2003).

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accepted May 28, 2010final version submitted June 13, 2010

William MazzarellaDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity of Chicago1126 East 59th St.Chicago, IL 60637

[email protected]

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