A Talk by @@Your Name/Nick@@, at Main Conference

How can India truly become 'Digital'? Results from an experiment of ethnographic praxis in an Indian bureaucracy

Federal, state and local governments in India deliver critical public goods and services to huge populations. In the summer of 2015, India’s prime minister announced the state’s ambitious “Digital India” program, incentivizing federal, state, and local governments to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to efficiently and transparently deliver critical public goods and services. But the Indian bureaucracy is yet to completely modernize its operations, build staff capacity to deliver services and simultaneously enable a large population to access e-governance initiatives proliferating in the name of modernization, transparency and efficiency. Numerous ICT enabled e-governance initiatives have been implemented in India so far, yet many of these initiatives in India (and the global south more broadly) have failed to create intended outcomes. While academicians have explained that these failures are a result of lack of deep understanding of the users (citizens) and their context on part of the governments, we know little about how tools like ethnography can be used to improve the implementation of e-governance initiatives.

Based on our experiences the talk will be about: 1. how ethnography can be used to understand the data needs of a large bureaucracy (in our case 100k+ staff) 2. the work done in two different worlds:

a) what it is to implement similar projects in completely different firms- one which is seen as a market leader in innovation, Apple Inc. and the other which is rarely associated with the word innovation, a government department in India
b) what it is to work in bureaucracies of a developed country vs a developing one

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