E for express: "seeing" the Indian state through ICTD
ICTD'09 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Information and communication technologies and development
Synergizing in Cyberinfrastructure Development
Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Why CSCW needs science policy (and vice versa)
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
We present findings from a qualitative field study of a national e-infrastructure project currently underway in India. We study how this large and complex infrastructure for issuing unique biometric-based identification numbers to the 1.2 billion residents of India was aligned across various stakeholders engaged in the project. We find that the focus on 'data' kept the entire infrastructure together and working. However, this narrow focus also made the design team view the people applying for IDs as numbers whose management could be standardized. In reality, the infrastructure encountered people with differing experiences and expectations of state-issued IDs, expectations that had to be managed by agents on the ground. With our focus on the nation state as a site for studying e-infrastructure, we extend the domains in which CSCW research takes place and contribute to the theory of infrastructure building in a context where state-citizen relations are at stake.