Abstract
In the summer of 2023, while doing my ethnographic fieldwork in New Delhi with technocrats working in the Delhi Government, I attended a 3 day consortium of various non-profit organizations, computer scientists and government officials working on ideating a Unified Benefits Interface (UBI). According to the consortium a UBI “aims to simplify access to India’s 500+ anti-poverty schemes through a citizen-centric approach” imagined as a single tech platform where the state maps welfare benefits onto its citizens based on the identifying information that it already possesses. The members of the consortium came together with the aim to remove the burden of proof of eligibility from the citizens and uncomplicate the process of welfare service delivery for the state. However, this participant observation exercise revealed interesting slippages and obfuscations as members slipped between terminologies of user and citizen. While designers and computer scientists kept referring to welfare recipients as end-users of the product, non-profit actors interchanged the reference to citizens as if both terms implied the same meaning. Implications of this slippage between a rights-bearing entity and a mere consumer of technology, bore importance on its function as a technical fix that could bypass the complex welfare bureaucracy of the Indian state while sidelining important concerns of data security, surveillance by the state and distrust in citizen-state relationships. In this paper, I use these observations from the consortium to think about how technocratic language turns into practice and exacerbates the above concerns that have already increased under the current ruling party.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
TECHNOCRACY, GOVERNANCE, RIGHTS
