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Digital India and the Poor

Digital India and the Poor examines how the poor are evoked in contemporary
Indian political discourse. It studies the ways in which the disadvantaged are
accounted for in the increasingly digitised political economy, commercial
and public policy, media, and academic research.
This book:

• Investigates the category of the poor in India and how they have come
to be classified in economic and policy documents over the past few
decades
• Explores the influential digital education technology ‘experiments’
conducted in Indian slums in the early 2000s, now popularly known as
the ‘hole-­in-­the-­wall experiments’
• Discusses financial inclusion initiatives, predominantly as they
converged between 2014 and 2017, such as the Jan Dhan Yojana, the
Aadhaar Project, and the banknote demonetisation
• Presents an in-­depth study of the bearing of technology on domestic
employment in India

The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South

Asian studies, politics, political science and sociology, technology studies,
linguistics, and development studies.

Suman Gupta is Professor of Literature and Cultural History at the Open

University, UK. He has held visiting positions at Delhi University, India;
Peking University, China; University of Texas Austin, USA; Federal University
of Campinas, Brazil, among others. He is Honorary Senior Research Fellow
at Roehampton University, UK. He has authored various publications
including Usurping Suicide: The Political Resonances of Individual Deaths
(2017, co-­author), Consumable Texts in Contemporary India: Uncultured
Books and Bibliographical Sociology (2015), Globalization and Literature
(2009), and The Theory and Reality of Democracy: A Case Study in Iraq
(2006).
Digital India and the Poor
Policy, Technology and Society

Suman Gupta
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2020 Suman Gupta
The right of Suman Gupta to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-­0-­367-­43894-­4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-­1-­003-­01024-­1 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For Bhola, Dhiren and Fuleshwar
Contents

List of tablesviii
Acknowledgementsix

1 Introduction: theme, method, terms, structure 1

PART I
Top-­down17

2 Experiments in slums, 1999–2006 19

3 From ‘informal sector’ to ‘financial inclusion’, 2004–14 54
4 ‘Financial inclusion’ initiatives, 2014–17 80

PART II
On the ground119

5 Domestic workers and the performance of hierarchy 121

6 Domestic workers and technology 143
7 Conclusion: slippages 176

Index186
Tables

3.1 Main workers, marginal workers, non-­workers and seeking

work, age 15–59 66
3.2 Literate and illiterate, age 15–59 66
3.3 Education-­level, without education level/below primary/
primary, age 15–59 67
3.4 Number of MSMEs and numbers employed, 2012–13 and
2013–1468
3.5 Income tax returns, all taxpayers, 2014–15 68
4.1 Network underpinning ‘financial inclusion’ initiatives in
India, especially 2014–17 108
6.1 Work conditions for placement-­agency and non-­placement-­
agency domestic workers 165
Acknowledgements

For a project such as this, the researcher needs space and time, amenable
facilities and access to sources. The Open University, where I am employed,
has generously provided all these and more. I am extremely fortunate in
my colleagues. They have developed the excellent habit of overlooking my
shortcomings and evincing interest in my pursuits. I have come to regard the
campus of Roehampton University, where I have been an honorary fellow
for a considerable period, as an extension of my home. None there have let
me feel otherwise than at home.
Frequent visits to Delhi have played their part in the writing of this book.
I have plied strangers and acquaintances with questions, filled the (some-
times reluctant) ears of friends and relatives, been an interloper at various
events and conferences, pestered librarians and bookshop keepers. To name
a few would be to do a disservice to the others; that I still don’t know the
names of some or have just about crossed paths with others doesn’t mean
that I am any less indebted to them.
Thanks are due to Aakash Chakrabarty of Routledge India for taking this
book towards publication. Cheng’s scepticism and Ayan-­Yue’s doubts about
my ideas keep my research moving.
For any errors found in this book, I am to blame.
Suman Gupta
September 2019
1 Introduction
Theme, method, terms,
structure

The theme
The phrase ‘Digital India’ in the title of this study refers to an aspiration for
progressive social development through technological means, particularly
post-­2000.
This aspiration has been espoused variously by the political state of India,
that is, by the central government, state governments and their agencies.
The phrase appears as a brand name for bullish schemes, most ambitiously
in the campaign launched by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-­led govern-
ment in July 2015, ratified by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet
in August 2014 (PIB 2014). The campaign incorporated a series of pro-
grammes ‘with the vision to transform India into a digitally empowered
society and knowledge economy’ (Digital India Website/ ‘About’ 2015),
including setting up comprehensive e-­governance structures, upgrading the
digital infrastructure (broadband speeds, access to internet, etc.) to the high-
est global standards, and fostering universal digital literacy. This imperi-
ous ambition gave the phrase renewed verve. Numerous reports have been
published about those aims, both upbeat and circumspect. This study is,
however, not contextualised by that campaign. The phrase ‘Digital India’ is
of wider import here. Despite the strong claims made in the government’s
campaign, it would be inaccurate to consider aspirations pinned on the
phrase as merely driven by government. Numerous commercial and non-­
governmental organisations (NGOs) are involved in the programmes, both
Indian and international (the distinction is now an extremely fluid one, often
no more than nomenclatural). To facilitate those involvements, the Ministry
of Electronics and Information Technology set up the Digital India Cor-
poration as a non-­governmental non-­profit company in 2017 (PIB 2017).
Though seemingly new, this was effectively a renaming of the research body
Media Lab Asia, which had been set up in 2001 by the same ministry in
association with, initially, the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Media Lab.
In fact, through its career the phrase ‘Digital India’ has united govern-
ments, corporations, NGOs and academia behind such aspirations. As a
2 Introduction
brand name ‘Digital India’ used to be owned by the Indian subsidiary of the
US-­based Digital Equipment Corporation from 1987, and went out of cir-
culation as such around 2003, when Digital merged with Compaq and that
in turn merged with Hewlett-­Packard. Having started life as a commercial
brand name, the phrase then passed into the vocabulary of various govern-
mental initiatives on e-­governance from 2006 onwards (notably the Digital
India Land Records Modernisation Programme from 2008), and of NGOs
trying to bring information technology resources to the marginalised (such
as the Digital Empowerment Foundation established in 2002). The phrase
has also been popular among academics surveying Indian digital systems
and prospects (such as Ghosh 2006; Thomas 2012; Athique 2012, Chap-
ter 5). All of these accruals of connotations and associations of the phrase
are relevant for this study.
This study focuses on a broad but delimited area on which the aspira-
tions of Digital India are frequently pinned: the poor. I have deliberately
foregrounded the relative informality of the term ‘poor’ rather than the
comparatively formal ‘poverty’. In academic circles, the term ‘poverty’
under the rubric of Poverty Studies is strongly associated with particular
socio-­economic methods, which are usually referred to as a canon of key
specialists and theories (for accessible overviews see Lister 2004; Haugh-
ton and Khandker 2009; Ravallion 2016). As such, ‘poverty’ is understood
immediately as a cohesive phenomenon or condition which calls for pre-
cise definition, numerate methods of measurement, data collection in spe-
cific contexts, and ultimately the determination thereby of the causes of
and strategies for alleviating poverty. The obviously distinct connotations
of ‘inequality’ are subject to a similar scholarly approach, and often feature
alongside or at least within the ambit of Poverty Studies. Particular social
factors – inadequate nutrition, housing, income, education, etc. – and the
attendant distresses appear as symptoms of a precedent malaise, ‘poverty’
or ‘inequality’, which needs to be tracked to its roots. Differing definitions
and methods for studying both ‘poverty’ and ‘inequality’ are subscribed, all
of which are variously contested or championed. Amidst differences, how-
ever, the disciplinary territory is fairly rigidly structured and territorialised.
Analytical methods associated with anthropology, media studies, linguistics,
philosophy, politics, history and so on have a conditional purchase in the
academic study of ‘poverty’, and appear as ancillary to this core structure
of Poverty Studies. In writing this, and choosing to foreground the loose
signification ‘poor’ here, I do not mean to disregard that valuable academic
approach to ‘poverty’, only to clarify the distinct perspective taken here.
The materials of Poverty Studies are often and necessarily referred to in the
following chapters, but this study is not a contribution in quite that mould.
The term ‘poor’ – and with that definite article ‘the poor’ – belongs to
the area of ordinary communications rather than the scholarly. It is often
loosely or suggestively used instead of being sharply defined, and works
by descriptive association instead of denoting a measured understanding
 Introduction 3
of the condition of poverty. In this sense, contemplating poor people may
revolve predominantly around one of the social factors associated with pov-
erty: living in congested and unsanitary conditions, doing informal work
and earning beneath the income-­tax threshold, having indifferent access to
education, and so on. And yet, being ‘poor’ has a readily accepted bearing
on the nuances of ‘poverty’ (as a well-­defined condition) and vice versa,
and may well be meaningfully used as such in formal applied contexts, for
instance in legal and policy documents. In the next section I pause on the
linguistic distinction between ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’ further.
By foregrounding ‘the poor’ I intend to draw attention to what this study
is about: the ways in which poor people and the condition of being poor
are discussed, represented and persuasively or purposively used in public
discourses related to the aspirations of Digital India – that is, in political
and policy, legal, commercial, media, and relevant academic contexts. Natu-
rally, rigorous definitions, corollary measurements and statistical analyses
have a salient, and often determinative, place within the spectrum of dis-
cursive contexts in question. Those are within the purview of this study, but
in relation to a larger discursive circuit which includes popular discourses,
publicity and propaganda. A necessary aspect of the theme of this study is:
who talks of poor people or the condition of being poor and why? The who
in this study is generally an institution or other collective alignment rather
than specific persons; considering the why is where the political thrust of
this study lies. In particular, the specific junctures discussed in the follow-
ing chapters concern complex intertwining of governmental and commer-
cial objectives, public and private interests, which clarify the expectations
contained in the phrase ‘Digital India’. I do not begin with an ideological
agenda, but hope to bring out the ideological agendas implicit in Digital
India – inferences of critical political import may follow from that.

Method and words

The theme of this study stated thus, along with the attention to words and
phrases already evident, suggests that the method followed here is that of
social (or sociolinguistic) discourse analysis. With a bit more political edge,
perhaps ‘critical discourse analysis’ (CDA) would be more apt, where the
term ‘critical’ is weighted with some interrogative and emancipative commit-
ment. In academic circles, recourse to a received discipline-­defined method
is usually reassuring, and this study may plausibly be regarded as such.
However, instead of referring to the usual sources describing CDA methods
(the numerous publications by Norman Fairclough, Teun Van Dijk, Ruth
Wodak, Theo van Leeuwen and others), a more immediate, brief and com-
paratively limited description of the method followed here is expedient.
I think of the following as involving the analysis of social texts which con-
verge on specific junctures (or case studies or situated contexts) relevant to
the theme and question stated previously. The phrase ‘social text’ is meant
4 Introduction
to bring together records and documents which may otherwise be dispersed
among different disciplinary and professional areas, and to analyse them in
a combined fashion. Social texts incorporate diverse kinds of records and
documents that converge on those specific junctures. Thus, legal and policy
documents, news reports and documentaries, tabulations of ‘raw data’ and
statistical analyses, popular-­culture performances and narratives, everyday-­
life images and records, scholarly papers from various disciplines could all
be considered social texts in bearing upon and informing a specific junc-
ture – in constructing, so to speak, the ‘socialness’ of that juncture. Where
pertinent, I try to be cognisant of the different communicative modalities
(print, digital, audio/visual) involved in texts, and the mechanics of their
production, reception and institutionalisation (or archived oblivion).
So, the ‘social’ is understood as structured by as well as structuring
communication, which is traceable through ‘texts’. The production of the
‘social’ in communication and vice versa accrues as ‘social texts’ in reposi-
tories/archives as a collective memory. The mutual bind of communication
and the ‘social’ is explored here with regard to what I dub as ‘specific junc-
tures’. I understand the latter as involving an attribution of social relevance
to particular themes or occurrences across a wide range of communica-
tions. Analysing social texts so as to both clarify particular junctures and
understand their social relevance may take different directions. Such analy-
sis may call for recovering such texts from habitual and everyday transi-
ence or dislocating them from their preconceived place in practical, expert
and scholarly precincts. Here, this analytical process follows the question
raised previously, and consists in tracking who, so to speak, voices the
social texts – that is, not so much as individual signatories but in terms of
collective positions – and why. Between the who and the why every social
text presents a rationale, the intent of which may or may not be realised
in the actual reception and circulation of such texts. The point of each
of the following chapters is to trace the interlocking or slipping rationales
for a specific juncture, from which larger patterns and overarching modes
of rationalising may become apparent. Together, the chapters would effec-
tively convey the social and political disposition of Digital India articulated
around the poor.
As noted already, the contextually specific nuances and deployment of
words and phrases in social texts is central to the method followed here.
It is therefore expedient to pause, at this introductory stage, on the term
which is the impetus for this study and gives it coherence – ‘poor’ – and
related terms – obviously ‘poverty’, but also a number of others (‘prole-
tariat’, ‘underclass’, etc.). Here, these terms are not merely neutral signifiers
in syntactical relationships with other signifiers; in social texts these come
with received ideological overtones, or are loaded with normative ideas and
rhetorical possibilities. Some notes follow underlining the ideological con-
tent of the terms ‘poor’ and relatedly ‘poverty’, and a range of associated
terms – arranged under three subheadings.
 Introduction 5
‘Poor’ and ‘Poverty’
The word ‘poor’ seldom calls for analytical pause, and the word ‘poverty’,
though more grounded in analytical registers, has also received sparse
linguistic attention. They often appear together and are considered to be
immediately meaningful in everyday usage, evoking certain kinds of mate-
rial suffering, deprivation and privation. Both dictionary and academic defi-
nitions generally conform to their everyday connotations while qualifying
or accentuating those. Put otherwise, these words appear to be transparent
and instrumental: words to consensually name a condition before examin-
ing or acting upon it. However, when contemplated as words they appear to
concentrate various calculations in usage.
Here’s an instance of a sociolinguist pausing briefly on the grammatical
nuances of the words (in English, of course) before analysing how they fea-
tured on a single page of a British tabloid newspaper in 1991:

Poverty is something that you are in; this makes it unlike measles, for
instance, or luck or hunger, which are things you can have. The place
you are in when you are in poverty is an abstract place, like despair
(which you are also in), a kind of mental place, an emotional state of
affairs. Poverty is not active; it is something with which you have been
affected, like hunger. Poverty is a state, not an event. To say ‘I am (liv-
ing) in poverty’ is to say ‘I am poor’. It is a quality, a characteristic
which acts as a description of a person, a classification.
This grammar is at once an explanation – not an overt, explicit expla-
nation, but one which, being covert, is all the more potent in its effects.
It tells us that poverty is something that you can be in, or get yourself
into; that it is a classification of the person to whom it attaches: ‘I am
poor’ is like ‘I am tall’ in that respect.
(Kress 1994, pp. 28–9)

The general point is that even the grammatical positioning of words like
‘poverty’ or ‘poor’ has social import, and already gestures towards explana-
tions. However, ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’ seem to me even less coterminous than
Kress suggests. To declare ‘I am living in poverty’ (as a declaration, ‘I am
in poverty’ is rare) is not quite the same as saying ‘I am poor’. The former
suggests a condition that I find myself in, ‘poverty’ is larger than me and
I am within it; the latter suggests a quality which I have internalised, the
quality of being ‘poor’ describes me. It is a slight difference, but perhaps a
significant one. Thereby different contexts of enunciation are indicated. ‘I
am living in poverty’ has an edge of considered formality in it; it comes in
the voice of someone who is, despite being poor, contemplating the condi-
tion of ‘poverty’ from a distance. The condition is looked at while being
owned. Appropriately, ‘poverty’ is the word that slides easily into official
and analytical discourse, inviting definition and disaggregation. ‘I am poor’
6 Introduction
is a comparatively informal and immediate declaration. It comes in the voice
of one who owns to a condition in everyday intercourse. The word ‘poor’
seems a bit too informal for definition and theorising. This slight differ-
ence is also emphasised when the words are used as collective nouns with
a definite article: ‘the poor’, ‘the poverty-­stricken’. ‘The poor’ are simply
described as being such; ‘the poverty-­stricken’ are understood as afflicted
with something. The explanative thrust of the latter is stronger: a call for
definitions and remedies is contained in it, and the word is tilted towards
formalised discourse. There’s also a matter of tone: ‘poverty’ sounds seri-
ous, where ‘poor’ is lighter. The word ‘poor’ may, for instance, be tinged by
epithets of endearment for the small suffering of children, or casual expres-
sions of sympathy. Similarly, the word ‘poverty’ might recall more abstract
and highbrow (especially academic) metaphoric usage – as in, the ‘poverty
of spirit/mind/philosophy/historicism/theory’.
Obviously, these slight differences between ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’ are spe-
cific to English, but may be found to not dissimilar effect with different
grammatical inflections in other languages. The difference between ‘being
poor’ and ‘being in poverty’ could, for instance, be conveyed in Hindi by a
word-­form change which emphasises the general condition (as also in Ger-
man, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic): garib गरीब (poor) to garibi गरीबी
(poverty), and similarly daridr दरिद्र or nirdhan निर्धन (literally, ‘without
wealth’) to daridrta दरिद्रता or nirdhanta निर्धनता (literally, ‘wealthlessness’).
However, the different tilts towards informality and formality in ‘poor’
and ‘poverty’ are nuanced in distinctive ways in Hindi. Garib and garibi,
from Arabic/Persian origins, are the most commonly used, across informal
and formal registers. In political slogans, for instance, which link official
usage to everyday usage, both may be used in the way ‘poor’ and ‘pov-
erty’ are in English without seeming particularly formal or informal (Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi’s 1971 election slogan garibi hatāo गरीबी हटाओ or
‘remove poverty’ is the familiar example). But words like daridr/daridrta
and nirdhan/nirdhanta, from their Prakrit/Pali origins, sound comparatively
formal – or appear to belong to a more erudite register. The complex history
and politics of modern language formations in Northern India underpin
these distinctions, which are not immediately relevant here.
So, Kress’s point in the previous quotation is not language-­specific but
works distinctively in different languages. At any rate, words like ‘poor’ and
‘poverty’ implicate social mediations within themselves, by their syntactical
implications and in their very enunciations. That is to say, these words antici-
pate their linguistic and communicative contexts and carry their relations to
other words, to histories of usage, and are grounded in situations and types of
interlocutors. Indeed, focusing on specific words thus might seem suspect to
linguists and cultural theorists, putting an unjustified emphasis on one level
of language and communication at the expense of others (syntax, discourse,
cognitive fields, historical shifts). It might seem more immediately productive
to consider words like ‘poor’ or ‘poverty’ in terms of the broad structures of
 Introduction 7
language and communication, rather than in themselves. However, the kinds
of mediations noted previously for these specific terms are often overlooked.
Historians occasionally offer analytical accounts of the fluidity of overly
familiar terms like ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’. Tracing the careers of these terms,
as Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Idea of Poverty (1984) did for the period
1750–1850 in England, naturally calls for attention to shifting nuances. The
terms do not simply ground the idea of being poor or in poverty, the idea is
often shaped and reshaped by interrogating and defamiliarising the terms.
Himmelfarb describes various such junctures: Edmund Burke’s objections to
the phrase ‘labouring poor’, arguing that the ‘poor’ are those who are una-
ble to work (pp. 68–9); the distinction between ‘pauper’ and ‘poor’ debated
around the 1834 Royal Commission report on the Operation of Poor Laws,
which complained about the ‘mischievous ambiguity of the word poor’
(quoted p. 159; debates outlined pp. 159–63); the epithets that acquired
currency when poverty and affluence came to be described in class terms,
as in the newspaper The Poor Man’s Guardian in the early 1830s (p. 241);
the deployment of the words ‘proletariat’ and ‘pauperization’ by Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels (more on this later), and their relation to the terms
‘poverty’ and ‘working class’ (pp. 283–7); Henry Mayhew’s use of anthro-
pological terms – ‘race’, ‘tribe’ – to describe different occupations of ‘the
poor’ in London (pp. 324–32). These junctures at which the terms ‘poor’
and ‘poverty’ became opaque, in Himmelfarb’s Adam Smith-­centred history
(all junctures are understood as departures from Smith’s inclusive wisdom),
were effectively moments when liberal principles were clarified, redefined
or contested. Interrogating the words were pathways to elucidating their
usually tacit ideological content. While the phenomenal experience and vis-
ibility of poverty were powerfully accounted around most such junctures,
the spur for interrogation and clarification did not quite derive from that
accounting, and certainly weren’t prompted by the poor themselves. Each
questioning and realignment of terms was offered to articulate immediate
political commitments, whether to argue for the direction of poor laws or to
present an indictment of the political establishment. Each juncture enabled
the elite cognoscenti – legislators, scholars, ideologues, reporters – to take a
position relative to each other within their political context simply by reg-
istering and emphasising these terms distinctively. That is to say, the terms
‘poor’, ‘poverty’ and the like bear a varied political charge. This political
charge describes the discourse of the cognoscenti in their period, and, at the
same time, links their discourse to the everydayness of their political life.
It is possible that the historian’s source material would foreground a par-
ticular nuance of these terms: the policy statements and reports, the trea-
tises of political economy, the statistical accounts and analyses, the media
reportage that they consult. The salience of source material in historicis-
ing poverty as a concept is foregrounded explicitly in another account, as
ambitious in scope as Himmelfarb’s, Alice O’Connor’s Poverty Knowledge
(2001). Reversing Himmelfarb’s (neoconservative) celebration of the path of
8 Introduction
classical liberal engagement with poverty, O’Connor tracked the twentieth-­
century path followed in the USA towards neoliberal disengagement from
poverty in government policy. The trajectory of academic discourses (‘pov-
erty knowledge’), wherein O’Connor sought an explanation for this turn,
usually did not depart from the formal term ‘poverty’. As a focal word, ‘pov-
erty’ remained fairly stable – albeit uneasily, since, ‘Ever aware of its nega-
tive connotations, research bureaucrats continually struggled with ways to
keep the word “poverty” out of their initiatives’ (p. 13). By way of histori-
cal tracing, O’Connor worked through academic concepts and investigative
methods that grounded poverty in politico-­economic structures, in social
prejudice, in class and community stratifications, in behavioural and psycho-
logical factors, in ethnographic or cultural determinants, in graded measure-
ments and econometric modelling to inform scientific policy making. In each
of these scholarly turns, the term both maintained its semantic integrity and
yet accommodated different – even contrary – ideological nuances.
Between Himmelfarb’s and O’Connor’s historical accounts a reasonable
sense of both the fluidity and the political potency of ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’ is
conveyed, as contextually resonant terms that invariably implicate concepts
and commitments, especially in liberal thinking. In fact, in considered senses,
both terms are now especially embedded in liberal worldviews. Since the lib-
eral worldview dominates at present, much of this study reflects upon and is
addressed to it. Within this liberal worldview, the terms ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’
carry a range of ideological emphases which revolve around one principal con-
sideration: the responsibilities of the political state towards, or the degree to
which the protection of the state extends to, vulnerable persons within its juris-
diction. This general statement of the ideological remit of these terms seems
consistent with the liberal histories outlined previously, but is nevertheless a bit
fuzzy. The idea of the political state and its jurisdiction are open to questions
and need clarifying, and are considered further as this study progresses – usu-
ally by contextually determinate application rather than by prescription.

The socialist register

The terms ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’ resonate somewhat differently for ideologi-
cal worldviews other than the liberal, and could, for instance, be elaborated
to question the legitimacy of the liberal political state. These terms might
thus be productively considered via socialist registers and discourses (or, less
productively, monarchic or theocratic).
The experience and visibility of poverty has often been the impetus for
revolutionary socialist formations, in industrial and agrarian societies as in
coloniser and colonised contexts. Engels’s The Condition of the Working
Class in England (1845; English trans. 1887) presents a formative junc-
ture in the development of revolutionary socialist commitment, memorable
for its sensitive description of poverty both as a lived experience and as a
visible phenomenon in industrial towns. Powerful denunciations of these
 Introduction 9
conditions occupy significant sections of Marx’s Capital, volume 1 (1887,
especially Ch. 25). However, while the condition is named as one of being
poor or poverty-­stricken, the terms work less to articulate the mere presence
of the condition (a problem to be acted upon and alleviated) and more to
identify the symptoms of a system (the problem is larger than the symptom).
Where in the liberal worldview the persistence of the poor is an unfortunate
and eradicable glitch, in the revolutionary socialist worldview it is an inevi-
table by-­product of capitalist production. The poor are then not a social
aberration to be brought into focus and managed, if not cured; the poor are
understood as actively produced by the system of capitalist production and
by the social relations which structure that system. And the cure then is to
move towards a different mode of production so as to configure different
social relations. From this perspective, the liberal naming of ‘the poor’ as
a passive population (suffering, visible) that can be cured, or ‘poverty’ as a
condition that can be alleviated, is a mode of distracting from the capitalist
logic which in fact constantly produces that population and condition. The
emphasis in using the terms ‘poverty’ or ‘poor’ with revolutionary socialist
verve is therefore to highlight a process – with regard to a population, but a
population exploited, and a condition, but a condition that’s manufactured.
The revolutionary socialist register consequently activates terms that under-
line the process which is evinced in poverty: ‘impoverishment’, ‘pauperisa-
tion’, ‘expropriation’, ‘evisceration’, etc.
More importantly, whereas in the liberal register terms like ‘the poor’
are ways of naming vulnerable and unwanted collectives, in the revolution-
ary socialist register that passivising option is largely refused. The nam-
ing of collective entities is instead directed towards terms which emphasise
the mutual relations between collectives within the capitalist system, their
mutually moulded class character: ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’, ‘capitalist’
and ‘working class’, haves and have-­nots. The production of the condition
of poverty, the experience and visibility of the poor, are absorbed within the
formations of the ‘proletariat’, and, more uneasily, the ‘working class’ as
they play their parts in the capitalist cycle. The very terms, especially ‘pro-
letariat’, become badges of socialist revolutionary subscriptions. And yet,
‘the proletariat’ are not ‘the poor’, and even less so is ‘the working class’.
‘The proletariat’ – and to some degree ‘the working class’ – are poor insofar
as being so arouses and confirms a revolutionary socialist commitment; i.e.
they refuse their passive containment in poverty. So, the naming of a col-
lective social entity, a proportion of the polity, as ‘the poor’ in the liberal
register does not coincide with ‘the proletariat’ in the revolutionary socialist
register. To suggest even an approximate overlap opens up a troubling split
within the fold of ‘the proletariat’, and Marx’s naming of the ‘lumpenpro-
letariat’ needs to be brought in: a part of ‘the proletariat’ which cannot
become revolutionary socialist, quite the contrary. This part of the ‘prole-
tariat’ could be bought out and used by conservative forces at a potentially
insurrectionary moment. In Marx’s account of Louis-­Napoleon’s self-­coup
10 Introduction
in 1851, he found the following amongst the lumpenproletariat who could
be thus co-­opted to the monarchist strategy:

Alongside the decayed roués of doubtful origin and uncertain means

of subsistence, alongside ruined and adventurous scions of the bour-
geoisie, there were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged crimi-
nals, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, confidence tricksters, lazzaroni,
pickpockets, sleight-­of-­hand experts, gamblers, masquereaux, brothel-­
keepers, porters, pen-­pushers, organ-­grinders, rag-­and-­bone merchants,
knife-­grinders, tinkers, and beggars.
(Marx 1973 [1852], p. 197)

Even beyond its immediate context, the list conveys the moral opprobrium
that attaches to the ‘lumpenproletariat’ irrespective of their straitened cir-
cumstances. Later Marxists of liberal bent (or liberals with a penchant for
Marx) have occasionally found this moral bitterness troubling, and interest-
ingly their disquiet is sometimes expressed as a matter of terminology, of
the political mediations in naming or in using words. Therefore Peter Stal-
lybrass (1990) finds his way into the complexities of Marx’s conception of
the lumpenproletariat thus:

Lumpen means ‘rags and tatters’; lumpig means ‘shabby, paltry’; and
then there are derivatives like lumpen-­gesindel, ‘rabble,’ and lumpen-­
wolle, ‘shabby.’ The name lumpenproletariat thus suggests less the
political emergence of a class than a sartorial category. . . . Marx and
Engels, indeed, sometimes used lumpenproletariat as a racial category,
and in this they simply repeated one of the commonplaces of bourgeois
social analysis in the nineteenth century: the depiction of the poor as a
nomadic tribe, innately depraved.
(p. 70)

Others have found more general conundrums in the mutual bind and
mutual slipperiness of revolutionary socialist (Marxist) terminology, espe-
cially when approached with a liberal conception of ‘the poor’ in view. This
is not just in moments such as the discomfiting appearance of ‘lumpenpro-
letariat’, but simply in the fundamental practice of designating classes so as
to express their social relation to each other. In Jacques Ranciere’s attempt
in The Philosopher and His Poor (2004 [1983]) to pin down a philosophy
apprehending ‘the poor’ within the Marxist oeuvre, it is unsurprising that
key socialist revolutionary words slip against each other to elide the poor.
Words lead Ranciere into a meditation on the crisis of Marxism in his time:

Thus the proletarian is nothing else than the negation of the worker. He
is the anti-­ideologue precisely insofar as he is the anti-­worker. By the
same token, the worker who is not yet a proletarian can be baptized
 Introduction 11
with a variety of names that are all equivalent: artisan, lumpen, petty
bourgeois, ideologue. . . . Supposed to interject itself between the
worker and the consciousness of his state, this baleful third party has
no consistency. . . .
If it amuses them, some may indulge in the grave recital of the ‘objec-
tive conditions’ delaying the development of proletarian consciousness,
but delay is not a historical category. The ‘consciousness’ in question
does not belong to the development of ‘objective conditions.’ Artisan,
petty bourgeois, lumpen: these sociohistoric categories are merely comic
masks disguising the distance between worker and proletarian, the non-
coincidence of the time of development and the time of revolution.
(p. 80)

The schism between ‘proletarian’ and ‘worker’ is pertinent but over-­stated by

Ranciere; some sort of liberal conception of ‘the poor’ as a stable outer horizon
is required to present ‘the worker’ and ‘the proletarian’ as so utterly at odds.

Naming
The previous observations on revolutionary socialist terms serve here to
clarify the thrust of the liberal register. Insofar as this study goes, ‘poor’ and
‘poverty’ are terms which signify in the liberal register. Liberal formations,
institutions, policies and politics predominantly structure the present. My
argument here builds upon the notion that how a condition, state of affairs,
collective idea is named – for example, as being ‘poor’ or ‘in poverty’ – emits
a political charge and announces an ideological stance: in this instance, of
liberal hue. Such naming recruits the phenomenon of material suffering and
privation to a political purpose, and equally politics infuses our grasp of
that phenomenon through such naming. I am using naming here in the way
Sylvain Lazarus used it in Anthropology of the Name (2015 [1996]); ‘poor’
and ‘poverty’ are in his scheme, ‘simple names’: ‘The simple name is a word
that opens up a field of thought – for example, politics’ (p. 66). They appear
as words that structure an area of social life; in Lazarus’s terms, as signi-
fiers of ‘the thought of people’, which are immediately also ‘a relation of
the real’. Naming ‘the poor’ in this sense precedes approaching them as an
object of study from which politics and policy would follow.
Perhaps the thrust of ‘poor’ as a simple name is best understood in rela-
tion to a cluster of associated terms (or associated namings, Lazarus might
call them ‘categories’). The use of ‘poor’, and correlatively ‘poverty’, has
signified a type of condition, person, group, place, idea, policy, etc., in a rel-
atively stable manner since around 1800. But, within the period since 1800,
the associated terms have shifted in indicative ways, tracing the dynamic
relationship of language to social transitions. A set of terms that used to be
commonly associated with ‘poor’ through the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries has been overtaken in common usage by another set through and
12 Introduction
since the later twentieth century. The earlier set includes words like ‘pau-
per’, ‘indigent’, ‘destitute’, ‘penury’, ‘vagrant’, ‘vagabond’; and the latter
such terms as ‘disadvantaged’, ‘underprivileged’, ‘deprived’, ‘homeless’. The
former terms are directly denotative, whereas the latter connote the nega-
tion of a standard (of being ‘advantaged’, ‘privileged’, ‘affluent’, ‘housed’).
Such standard-­negating terms gesture implicitly towards a party responsible
for maintaining standards, typically thought of as the liberal state (govern-
ment). I am confining this observation to words in English which have some
kind of formal place, which are apt to appear in legal and policy research
papers, in the headings of bills and statutes, in the titles of institutions and
commissions, in academic and journalistic reports, and in political com-
munications and therefore in everyday communication. A large number of
colloquial and informal words are relevant but not germane here, which
have surfaced and drowned in a continuous informal flow: ‘bum’, ‘dosser’,
‘tramp’, ‘hobo’, ‘drifter’, ‘bagman’/‘bagwoman’, ‘skint’, ‘broke’, ‘penniless’,
‘bust’, ‘strapped’, ‘down-­and-­out’ and so on.
The terms now associated with ‘the poor’ in liberal discourse are obviously
of more importance for this study than the relatively archaic or uncommon.
Such terms, in fact, have occasionally been tracked, questioned, analysed,
and deconstructed productively. At times such questioning has served to
reflect upon scholarly and social mediations of poverty themselves.
Ideas of ‘social class’, discussed previously with reference to the socialist
register, play their part in contemporary liberal terminology with reference
to the poor in distinctive ways. This is usually in relational terms (such as,
upper/middle/lower classes), but occasionally has an independent dynamic
when class is used to categorise ‘the poor’. Notably, ‘underclass’ has had a
troubled but productive career since Gunnar Myrdal (1962) coined the term
to refer to the unemployed and unemployable, by way of explaining the eco-
nomic conditions which give rise to their presence. In subsequent decades
the word was called upon to characterise neighbourhoods and ethnicities,
to chart the behavioural characteristics of the poor, and to develop various
measurements of poverty (Aponte 1990 gave a useful account of various
definitions) – so that the ambiguities of the term led to a heated debate.
Herbert Gans (1990), in arguing that the term itself had come to pose some
dangers for research and policy, observed:

In the past five years the term’s diverse definitions have remained basi-
cally unchanged, although the defining attempt itself has occasioned a
very lively, often angry, debate among scholars. Many researchers have
accepted much or all of the now-­dominant behavioral definition; some
have argued for a purely economic one, like Myrdal’s; and some – this
author included – have felt that the term has taken on so many con-
notations of undeservingness and blameworthiness that it has become
hopelessly polluted in meaning, ideological overtone and implications,
 Introduction 13
and should be dropped – with the issues involved studied via other
concepts.
(Gans 1990, p. 272)

However, Gans’s call to drop the word had little effect. Instead, research-
ers found the debate around it to be revealing; and historicising the use of
‘underclass’ itself offered a way of structuring various approaches to pov-
erty (starting with Katz 1993, 1995, Chapter 2). In a related manner, the
word ‘slum’ to refer to the living conditions of the poor has been exposed to
searching interrogation. Alan Gilbert’s (2007) objections to its uncritical use
are, as he says, reminiscent of Gans’s objections to ‘underclass’:

What makes the word ‘slum’ dangerous is the series of negative associa-
tions that the term conjures up, the false hopes that a campaign against
slums raises and the mischief that unscrupulous politicians, developers
and planners may do with the term. Since writing the first draft of this
article I have discovered that Gans (1990) makes a similar complaint
about the dangers inherent in using the term ‘underclass’. The difference
is that he is complaining about the dangers that are inherent in using a
new, somewhat euphemistic, term. I am complaining about resuscitating
an old, never euphemistic, stereotype; one that was long ago denounced
as dangerous and yet has now resurfaced in the policy arena.
(Gilbert 2007, p. 701)

A debate about the use of the word has followed and will probably continue.
On a related note, in Britain the ideological manoeuvers involved in Tony
Blair’s New Labour government policies on tackling ‘social exclusion’ after
1997, led to numerous critical explorations into the nuances of the phrase.
Ruth Levitas (1998, Chapter 1) observed that the phrase seems to homog-
enise the socially ‘included’ and seeks to gloss over the complexities of social
stratification and power so as to make ‘exclusion’ a peripheral singularity;
Norman Fairclough (2000, Chapter 2) found that by making a distinction
between ‘social exclusion’ and ‘material poverty’, and by focusing govern-
ment policy on the former, New Labour language seemed to render the poor
passive; David Byrne (1999) had by then already considered the history of
the phrase (and concept), to suggest that its deployment was a tactful way of
blaming the poor and diluting welfare provisions. Historicising and redefin-
ing ‘social exclusion’ with reference to British and European Union policies
has since formed a voluminous scholarly enterprise, as revealing of the lan-
guage of policy making and of scholarship itself as of the condition referred
by the phrase. Comparatively less analysed, phrases which call explicitly
on the standard of welfare benefits to refer to the poor (usually pejora-
tively or with suspicion) are ripe for similar critical engagement: such as,
‘on benefits’, ‘benefit claimant’, ‘benefit cheat’, ‘benefit fraud’. These could
14 Introduction
be considered standard-­policing phrases as opposed to standard-­negating
terms like ‘socially excluded’, ‘marginalised’ or ‘disadvantaged’. As such,
the former seem to hold the poor who receive benefits accountable or cul-
pable in contrast to considering that they are owed obligations by standard-­
maintaining authorities (the government).
Words and phrases in this area are never free of ideological inflection.

Structure
With these initial notes on the theme of this study, and on the relevant meth-
ods and terms, let me move towards its main business. Two Parts follow,
‘Top-­down’ (Part 1) and ‘On the Ground’ (Part 2), each with chapters pay-
ing close attention to social texts relevant to specific junctures.
The top-­down perspectives discussed in Part 1 are found in social texts
relevant to academic and policy discourses of a large scale, such as those that
bear upon poor people across the country (and the world). The junctures
in question here, to which such social texts were anchored, foregrounded
a top-­down view of poor people in relation to technological development.
Three chapters feature in Part 1. The first (Chapter 2) explores influential
education-­technology ‘experiments’ conducted in Indian slums (here, the
focus is on Delhi) from the late 1990s to around 2006, now popularly
known as the ‘hole-­in-­the-­wall experiments’. Two subsequent chapters (3
and 4) are devoted to ‘financial inclusion’ initiatives, predominantly as they
converged between 2014 and 2017. Chapter 3 examines the backstory lead-
ing into this period, describing a policy shift from the ‘informal sector’ to
‘financial inclusion’ and proposing an analytical framework to consider the
initiatives in a cohesive fashion. Chapter 4 then discusses the initiatives in
question by turn, but so as to discern cross-­connections and overlapping
rationales: the Jan Dhan Yojana, the Aadhaar Project (underpinned by the
Aadhaar Act 2016), and the banknote demonetisation move.
Thus, in Part 1, ‘Top-­down’, principles of general social import (such as,
the role of digital technology in primary education in Chapter 2) and poli-
cies for large-­scale social engineering (such as, instituting systems for finan-
cial management in Chapters 3 and 4) are at stake, with progressive claims
and commercial interests threaded through them. Those formulating such
principles and policies tried variously to obtain an overview of the poor. The
poor were gauged according to definitions of their characteristics and needs,
consumptions and habits, etc. These overviews enabled the principles to
ostensibly include them and policies to be putatively extended to them. The
poor were seemingly accommodated within social development enabled by
technology, in particular by networked digital apparatuses and infrastruc-
tures. Or, at any rate, benefits to the poor were foregrounded as the main
reason for promoting adoption of the latter. However, despite appearances,
the developmental initiatives that followed were seldom directed specifi-
cally towards poor people. The technological applications and commercial
drives were generally wider and targeted all consumers, affluent and poor
 Introduction 15
alike. But in every case the poor were particularly invoked, appeals were
made in their name, their custom courted, their cooperation and compliance
demanded. The poor in India thus appeared within the purview of national
and transnational visions and programmes. They became stepping stones in
projects for universal education, all-­inclusive governance, global enterprise.
The poor flickered and came into focus and blurred and at times disap-
peared in such top-­down views.
In turning to on-­the-­ground perspectives in Part 2, I do not really offer
a bottom-­up view or try to present the perspective of poor people them-
selves on such technological development. A bottom-­up perspective would
naturally be of interest here, but I am uncertain whether it can be meaning-
fully obtained. Various means for obtaining bottom-­up social perspectives,
or at the least getting close to such perspectives, have been attempted by
researchers. In almost all of those it has proved difficult to determine where
the investigator’s preconceptions end and untrammelled access to the poor
research-­subjects’ perspective begins. Instead, in Part 2 an attempt is made
to look closely at the nitty gritty of work and life among the informally
employed, or, more precisely, a segment of that population which is ordinar-
ily considered poor. Social texts relevant to a particular close-­to-­the-­ground
social relation are examined here: that of domestic workers and their employ-
ers in contemporary India, mainly as that relationship has evolved over the
period covered in Part 1. The domestic worker-­employer relationship is con-
sidered here, somewhat unusually for the Indian context, in terms of con-
cepts of and social arrangements grounded in technology. In that respect,
both parts cohere with the backdrop of aspirations pinned on Digital India.
Two chapters belong in Part 2 (‘On the Ground’). Chapter 5 does some
preparatory work prior to focusing on the bearing of technology on the
domestic worker-­employer relationship in the subsequent chapter. Exist-
ing scholarship on domestic worker-­employer relations is surveyed, and
one particular feature of this relationship highlighted: dubbed ‘the habitual
interpersonal performance of hierarchy’ here. Chapter 6 then examines the
bearing of technological development on the domestic worker-­employer
relationship at two levels. First, this relationship is considered in terms of
the technology that is used in employers’ homes (mainly appliances); and
second, technology that is not directly relevant to domestic work but may
mediate the worker-­employer relationship is considered.
A brief Conclusion draws together strands of arguments that cut across
both parts.

References
(All weblinks cited in this chapter were last accessed on 20 August 2019)

Aponte, Robert (1990). “Definitions of the Underclass: A Critical Analysis”. In Her-

bert J. Gans ed. Sociology in America. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. 117–37.
Athique, Adrian (2012). Indian Media: Global Approaches. Cambridge: Polity.
16 Introduction
Byrne, David (1999). Social Exclusion. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Digital India Website/ ‘About’ (2015). www.digitalindia.gov.in/content/about-programme
Engels, Friedrich (1987). The Condition of the Working Class in England. London:
Penguin.
Fairclough, Norman (2000). New Labour: New Language. London: Routledge.
Gans, Herbert J. (1990). “Deconstructing the Underclass: The Term’s Dangers as a Plan-
ning Concept”. Journal of the American Planning Association 56:3, Summer. 271–7.
Ghosh, D.K. (2006). Digital India: Rural Empowerment and Transformation. New
Delhi: UBS.
Gilbert, Alen (2007). “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?” Interna-
tional Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31:4. 697–713.
Haughton, Jonathan and Shahidur R. Khandker (2009). Handbook on Poverty and
Inequality. Washington: World Bank.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude (1984). The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial
Age. London: Faber and Faber.
Katz, Michael B. ed. (1993). The ‘Underclass’ Debate: Views from History. Prince-
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Katz, Michael B. (1995). Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the ‘Under-
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London: Seagull.
Levitas, Ruth (1998). The Inclusive Society: Social Exclusion and New Labour. Bas-
ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lister, Ruth (2004). Poverty. Cambridge: Polity.
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Ravallion, Martin (2016). The Economics of Poverty: History, Measurement, and
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nication and Social Change. New Delhi: Sage.
Part I

Top-­down
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 »Joutavia! Se oli mahdotonta. Sitäpaitsi he olivat Martignyn
vaikutuksen alaisina, ja luullakseni hän pystyi mihin rikokseen
hyvänsä.»

»Ehkä hän ajatteli, että satatuhatta olisi vain ensimmäinen suoritus

hänelle. Neiti Holladayn ollessa hänen vallassaan hän olisi kyllä
voinut toivoa saavansa lisää loppumattomiin. Ilman häntä —»

»Mitä ilman häntä?»

»No, juoni kehittyy ja kehittyy kuta enemmän sitä ajatellaan.

Luulen sen kehittyneen silläkin aikaa, kun hän oli sitä
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Seuralaiseni nyökäytti päätänsä.

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Kumarsin kiitokseksi; tahdoin näet oppia ranskankieltä niin

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