MEDIA@LSE Electronic Working Papers

Editors: Professor Robin Mansell, Dr. Bart Cammaerts

No. 19
(De)Politicizing Information Technology: Towards an
Inclusionary Perspective

Dipankar Sinha

Other papers of the series are available online here:

http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/mediaWorkingPapers/
Dipankar Sinha (sinhadipankar2007@gmail.com) is Professor of Political Science, Calcutta
University, and Honorary Visiting Professor at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata.
He has authored Communicating Development in the New World Order (1999) and in
Bengali, Media Sanskriti (2003). He has also co-edited Webs of History: Information,
Communication and Technology From Early to Post-Colonial India (2005) and Democratic
Governance in India: Reflections and Refractions (2007).

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Copyright, EWP 19 - (De)Politicizing Information Technology: Towards an Inclusionary

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(De)Politicizing Information Technology:

Towards an Inclusionary Perspective

Dipankar Sinha

ABSTRACT

Information Technology (IT) in/for development has become both a catch-all term and an
attractive political slogan. In effect IT is hyped as a sort of 'magic wand' that is supposed to
eradicate social deprivation and economic disparity almost instantaneously. Admittedly, IT
has a key role in the construction of a better economy, society and empowerment of
ordinary people in the developing countries. However, its uncritical promotion in
communication about policy and political discourse –- without taking into account the social
reality that exists in developing countries – is counter-productive. Politically, it enforces
certain closures which also gives IT an ‘apolitical’ character, severely undermining diversity
of opinions, the space for dissent and the need for democratic scrutiny, all of which are
supposed to provide legitimacy for any public policy claiming to have problem-solving
strategies. The paper – citing instances from south Asia and from Brazil for its innovative
initiative in adopting an inclusionary path – asserts the need for concerted intervention by
practitioners of the social sciences to expose and counter the politics of depoliticization that
creep into the IT-centric imaginary of development.

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‘When the minister assures us that in near future we would chat with the American farmers about our
crops he seems to have lost both his head and the pair of feet to new technology. He has lost his
thinking capacity and cannot stand on the ground of his society.’ (a farmer-respondent in India)

INTRODUCTION

The fact of the matter is that Information Technology (IT) has come to stay and shape our
life in an unprecedented way. It is hardly possible to think of any other phenomenon that
has such a formidable, lasting and profound impact. The coming of the Information
Revolution, with IT as its infrastructural backbone, has been characterized by the steady
ascent of information as the most critical element in development – which, broadly, is a
bottom-up process of social transformation, backed up by capacity-building of people, not
only in material terms but also in terms of the expansion and intensification of the webs of
human relations1. In this idea of development information remains at centrestage. The
quantity, quality and the nature of the information flow determine the degree to which
development will take place. IT has a very important role in this context because it has not
only revolutionized the generation, transmission, storage and retrieval of information in a
manner that was unimaginable in the past, it also has made the vintage Baconian dictum –
‘information is power’ – come true. However, when the quantum of power associated with
information is so great it invariably produces a lot of publicity-blitz about the
transformational potential of IT. The pitch reaches so high as to infuse magical qualities into
IT which then are expected to transcend existing problems and frictions in delivering a better
society. This trend presents quite an opportunity for social scientists to evaluate IT’s role-
performance and to look for the hidden transcript vis-à-vis its celebration as the be all and
end all of ‘development’. Acknowledging the power and potential of IT I argue that when it
comes to its seductive rhetoric – seeking to convince people about ‘IT as the magic wand’ –
the hidden transcript has much to do with what can be described as the politics of
depoliticization. This paper, through problematizing IT, calls for an inclusionary perspective
in which its immense potential is recognized without, however, relying excessively on its
presumed agency. A major premise of this paper is that a massive and extensive ‘injection’
of technology into societies marked by unequal and non-participatory structural relationships
is a cosmetic and self-defeating endeavour that would do more harm than good for the
developing world.

1
While perceiving development in this manner it must be borne in mind that it also has the propensity to turn
into a myth. However, I do not subscribe to the post-developmentalist urge to reject it in its totality, even as a
concept.

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MIRROR IMAGE OR MIRAGE?

Technology generally unleashes a specific kind of power to crush any skeptical and critical
expressions and articulations about it. Expanding and enriching the tradition established by
Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul and the Frankfurt School, Habermas (1984; 1987) in the
present reminds us of a power-laden process by which our concerns for values, rights,
freedoms and privileges are converted into issues and questions about cost and bureaucratic
and technocratic efficiency. This process results, Habermas argues, in the colonization of our
imagination, or technically, the lifeworld – is composed of activities in social spheres which
among others are dedicated to the transmission of cultural norms and the integration of
various social spheres. The colonization or technicization of the lifeworld invariably takes its
toll – by threatening, minimizing and ending the traces of diversity, dissent, protest and
resistance – not only in political institutions but also in aesthetic and expressive institutions.
While he did not specifically deal with technology, for Habermas the central question was
how can the power of technical control be brought within the range of consensus of acting
and transacting citizens.

In our context, it is also important to mention Winner (1986: 98-117) who perceptively wrote
about ‘mythinformation’, a concept intertwined with the animated discussion about the
coming of the Information Society, a society which only serves the interests of select social
groups seeking to promote computer systems. Winner also coined the revealing phrase
‘technological somnambulism’ which, by privileging technological agency, blurs normative
visions of social reconstruction. Winner provides the much needed clue to the argument in
this paper by explaining how technology has become a ‘politeia’ by gaining in institutional
status. In an empirical study of Lesotho, Ferguson (1990) presents us with a remarkable
model, the anti-politics machine, to explain how ‘development’ projects can effectively
squash political challenges to the system, not just by enhancing administrative power, but by
casting political questions as a ‘technical problem’. The ‘anti-politics machine’, Ferguson
notes, suspends ‘politics’ even in the most sensitive political operations ‘at the flick of a
switch’.

Offering a judicious mix of the conceptual and empirical dimensions, Avgerou and McGrath
(2007), in their study of Information Systems (IS) vis-à-vis the development, deployment
and the use of the IT, draw upon the Foucauldian perspective on power and knowledge to
throw light on the relations of power and technical rationality. They point out that such an

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understanding facilitates our understanding in two major ways: first, by paving the way for
realistic expectations of the ways, and the extent to which professional interventions may
steer the IS innovation process; and second, by developing “our” capacity for assessing the
potential effects that IS innovation may have in different social circumstances. The way
through this situation has been outlined by Habermas in terms of the public sphere, a space
for rational deliberative actions. However, Habermas theorizes the structural transformation
of the public sphere in terms of the westcentric reality and the western bourgeois society.
This is to be distinguished from the reality that exists in the ‘non-western’ developing
societies in which a vibrant public sphere faces many constraints even before its emergence
and growth.

Notwithstanding these insights by their western counterparts, social scientists in developing

societies have left the ‘official’ IT-hype and the associated politics of depoliticization largely
unexamined. With few notable exceptions, some of which will be discussed subsequently,
the critical literature, amidst the prolific congratulatory literature on IT, has remained mostly
confined to the analysis of ‘defects’ either in ‘deployment mode’ or in the ‘implementation
process’ or in both. The problem perhaps lies in information itself being conceptualized and
analyzed in a way that brings closure to this kind of investigation. Tracing the
epistemological roots of such closure we can refer to the notion of classificational information
suggested Maruyama (1980: 28-29) – the idea that a specific kind of information has an
objective meaning which is universally understandable without reference to other kinds.
Consequently, a typical ‘economic perspective’ on information evaluates it as the most
powerful factor of production and the most valuable resource. A typical ‘social perspective’
relates information and IT to enhancing consciousness about one’s own ability among
members of society. A typical ‘cultural perspective’ would call for the promotion of
information values for a reorientation of individual and collective values. In a typical ‘political
perspective” information would be hailed as an enabling force and IT as the empowering
infrastructure. The common basic epistemological assumption in all these ‘segmented’
perspectives is that the universal circulation of information, backed up by the astounding
reach and power of IT, is sure to expand the universe of ‘development’, leading to the birth
of a whole new world.

When IT is perceived in a superficial manner, seeking to lend legitimacy to policy by hiding

its problems and crises from the public arena, the hype sets in. Communicative actions are
discouraged and minimized by policymakers and it is projected, by way of manufactured

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consent, that more and more IT will lead to more and more development. As a result, IT
becomes a sort of mirage whereby the Information Super Highway is reduced to the
Information Super Hypeway (Preston, 2001). The solution lies in a more rigorous and intense
perspective, political in the broader sense, in which the possible routes to utilization of IT
power can be related to the specifics of the society concerned. It would certainly visualize a
better world, but not without raising and exploring an answer to an uncomfortable but
extremely relevant question – if IT has magical potential, for whom is it supposed to serve?

The answer to the question seems rather obvious. Is it not the case that IT is meant for all?
In a way it is, but the question must be read in the context of the digital divide that exists
not only between the developed countries and their poorer counterparts but also within the
developing societies themselves. While in the international arena the developed countries
boast of having firmly rooted ‘information societies’, within the developing countries
themselves, there are at best, only ‘pockets’ or ‘beach-heads’ of information societies, and
worse still, widespread information-famines, with some vital features of development
remaining out of reach of the majority of people. In India, for instance, despite many claims
about IT deployment here and there, information remains a scarce resource for many. Thus,
the lack of appropriate information results in the loss of lives of hundreds of fishermen who
sail the sea completely unaware of impending disaster; it has also led to the suicides of
thousands of farmers who lack relevant information about the market viability of their crops.
As long as technology is accorded priority over information in the technocratic discourse such
events will continue to occur frequently. Thus, a former bureaucrat, seemingly oblivious to
the connotations of the words ‘buzzword’ and ‘slogan’, writes (Dey 2000: 302) in a
congratulatory vein:

True, e-governance…is the ultimate buzzword in the world. It sound like ultimate win-win.
Suddenly, the slogan has caught on. [...] Imagine hundreds of queue-weary citizens flocking
to internet kiosks for everything. […] They are soon going to be the ground reality. […]
Andhra Pradesh is on the highway to ‘governing the e-way’.

I will subsequently consider the fate of Chandrababu Naidu who was steering Andhra
Pradesh to the superhighway of e-governance. It is important here to note that the key
figures in the discourse communities, beyond the official policymakers, also fail to rise out of
the technicist orbit celebrating the ‘IT power’.

It seems that social scientists and activists in the developing countries – even those who
otherwise have made pioneering contributions to society – periodically go overboard when it

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comes to IT power. A typical example is Professor Muhammad Yunus, the founding director
of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh who has gained international recognition, including the
Nobel Peace Prize, for his spectacular role in providing micro-credit to the poor. In his book
Bangladesh 2010, Yunus (2000) argues that Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the
world (often derisively described as the ‘basket case’), is on the verge of radical and magical
transformation through the introduction of IT. As he writes (2000: 56):

Thanks to IT, time has come to do away with the distinction between city and village. One can
work in any city in any country of the world by being in the village […] there would be no
difference between the girl or boy working in New York and the girl or boy working in
Patuakhali district in Bangladesh.

Yunus (2000: 62-63) goes further and attempts to imagine an IT-led restructuring of the
polity in Bangladesh:
The concepts of the State and the government would be radically changed. There would be
an organization by the name of government, only to maintain a historical tradition. Elections
would perhaps be held as sort of celebration but there would be little role for the head of the
State. He would only be there to receive salute in the children’s parade. The government
would only exist formally. […] Collective decision on any matter would be taken by people
instantaneously by electronic means.

There are several reasons why I refer to Yunus’s ‘dream’ Bangladesh. First, and most
obvious, it reveals the extent to which IT, with an obsessive stress on homogenization and
instantaneousness, stretches our imagination, the degree to which we are ready to sacrifice
commonsensical interpretations of reality for the utopia. The last quote comes particularly
close to the technocratic ideas of Computopia and the Automated State in which the state is
perceived in terms of highly sophisticated and widely distributed electronic circuitry. Second,
Yunus’s IT-sourced imaginary, which views the grassroots level transformation of rural
Bangladesh as a ‘manifestation’, rather than as a ‘pre-condition’ to technological change, has
unleashed intense criticism from some social thinkers in his country. Rahman (2000: 238-47)
makes a scathing critique of Yunus’ Bangladesh 2010 scheme in general and more
specifically of Yunus’s argument that the “spread of telephone connections would pull
Bangladesh out of economic disaster”. Mentioning that such a scheme reminds him of the
aphorism “The more man dreams, the less he believes”, Rahman (2000: 40-41) observes:

Whereas an excessively strong organization [the State] prevents Professor Yunus from
progressing further, is it not an absurd dream that in a thoroughly inequitable society he
would be able to change the life of huge number of common people through the Internet and
other [information] technologies? […] Does new technology necessarily eradicate the distance
among people? Has the lady owning a phone in rural Bangladesh been able to bridge the gap
between her and the owner of a phone in Dhaka? […] We need not remind Professor Yunus
that while on the one hand, certain social conditions have to be fulfilled to utilize technology,
on the other hand, it is also the case that such process relates to the economy, the ruling
class and even class-based equations.

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Interestingly, in what may not be a coincidence Yunus’s IT imaginary comes extremely close
to that of Negreponte, formerly of the MIT Lab, but better known for his promotion of IT-
driven society. Negroponte’s great dream is to equip each child in the third world with a
laptop as this is supposed to be a means of education, entitlement and empowerment. If
Yunus had Rahman as his ‘adversary’, Negroponte has Winston (2007: 170) who wryly
states:

I would suggest that here Negroponte becomes a Marie Antoinette, but, instead of advising
the French 18th century poor to eat cake as a substitute for bread, he proposes letting the
South’s huddled masses have little computers rather than life's other more obvious
necessities.

These debates may occur in specific locales, be it Bangladesh or the USA, but they have
great relevance for any developing society. Let us substantiate the point using a specific
instance. In India, the publicity-blitz of so-called e-governance in the Indian federated state
of Andhra Pradesh was orchestrated by the former chief minister, ‘cyberdreamer’
Chandrababu Naidu, while the state remained in the lower rung of the human development
index. Alhough the critics of his IT policy, which was thoroughly urban-centric, were ridiculed
by his admirers as ‘laggards’, the IT hype, mainly generated by policymakers like Naidu also
cast a spell on others, including the media. As the following excerpt reveals, Naidu
developed an unparalleled media image

Chandrababu Naidu is a dreamer – the master of the grand statement, the painter of the
grand vision. By 2020 […] his state […] will be a land of thriving industry, flourishing
agriculture and a vast service sector. Poverty will be a faint memory. A spinner of yarns?
Not really. The AP chief minister is only trying to get the people and the administration to
think and act big, like himself […] The cyberdreamer has shown the impossible can be done.
Electronic governance, for instance. The critics said that it was too farfetched, that it
was elitist. Today…they have been proved wrong. (Businessworld, 1999: 23 – emphasis
added)

Naidu eventually was overthrown by the vast rural electorate many of whom, struggling in
dire poverty and underdevelopment, were completely untouched by the high-end IT
revolution. The vanishing distinction between the city and the countryside that Yunus
visualizes so enthusiastically did not occur in this case. One major point in his defence, as I
have argued elsewhere (Sinha, 2005c: 16), can be found in the arguments of the TDP
[spellout acronym] activists and general supporters of Naidu. This was that the urban tilt was
part of his ‘overall plan’ to take advantage of the ‘trickle down’ effect to spread IT in rural
areas. But the counter-argument was that the ‘golden Andrha Pradesh’ - characterized by
promises like ‘total eradication of poverty’, ‘basic minimum needs’, ‘happy fulfilling life’ and
‘knowledge and learning society’ – was bound to fail because it privileged only the already

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privileged segments. The publicity-blitz associated with the promotion of the state capital
Hyderabad as the ‘IT hub’ of India left the rural areas largely alienated. As one analysis
(Yahya, 2009: 388) of Naidu’s decline notes, ‘[t]he consequences of building Hyderabad into
an IT hub have proven financially costly and eroded the support…in rural areas’. Naidu was
banished from power. At least to date he shows no sign of regaining it. In Yunus’s case, the
Bangladesh continues to be far from experiencing the revolutionary transformation that he
was visualizing.

Not very different is the case of Sri Lanka, India’s southern neighbour. Goonawardane (n.d.),
who refuses to indulge in the ‘cheer-leading’ that often marks the IT scenario, polemically
raises a fundamental question: Why is not IT in the mainstream of public life and public
affairs in Sri Lanka? He also raises a number of ancillary issues regarding the role of ITin
income generation, easier interfaces with government, support of cultural and personal
needs, and finally, affordability, user-friendliness and minimization of barriers – all in the
interest of the ordinary people and for ensuring public trust and acceptance. Warning that it
is easy to be ‘mesmerized’ by IT he advocates the cultivation of a ‘big picture’ of IT’s role in
society and the economy, which he argues can be made possible by ‘credible, articulate and
passionate individuals’, capable of being involved in public debates.

A distinctive feature of Rahman’s response is the way he seeks to relate IT to the existential
reality of the developing world. It is important to note that he does not dismiss the power of
IT; he seeks to problematize it in terms of the conditions prevailing in his society. As he
dramatically puts it (Rahman, 2000: 45): ‘When people in my country have empty stomachs,
nothing works so smoothly…not even if telephones are pushed into the belly’. Last but not
least, critical analyses of this kind remind us that they are infrequent when it comes to
situating the IT problematique in the developing societies. And as long as this is so, the
hidden transcript of the politics of depoliticization goes largely unnoticed and mostly
unchallenged.

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(DE)POLITICIZATION AT WORK

Technology and its technocratic rationality seek to weaken politics by robbing it of diversity
and spontaneity. Undermining this, deliberately or in some cases due to ignorance, the top-
level policymakers – leaders, bureaucrats and technocrats – of developing countries, after
their desperate bid and consequent failure for decades to reap the fruits of development, are
now relying on IT to bridge the yawning gap. Elsewhere I (Sinha, 2005a: 245-64; Sinha,
2005b: 135-61) has discussed extensively how India very much constitutes a part of this
scenario. Keniston (2002: np), a veteran observer of the ICT-sourced projects in India, is
being pragmatic and not cynical when he makes the following observation:

Not surprisingly, in discussions of IT for the common man, there is a great deal more talk than
action […] But a more careful reading, to say nothing of visits to the sites themselves,
indicates that in such plans, the operative verbs are not “is” and “does”, but rather “will” and
“would”. These are plans, wishes, dreams, promises. In only a few cases do they have any
on-the-ground reality.

When the policymakers who determine our destiny resort to IT idolatry this seems to signal
the end of politics. An excessive and uncritical faith in ‘IT power’ gives rise to a condition in
which the idea that all social ills are there only because there has not been ‘sufficient and
efficient’ application of IT gains ground. This in turn gives rise to a situation in which any
dissenting perspective is regarded as unnecessary and, even worse, illegitimate. The
resistance of policymakers to any kind of dissent becomes even stronger because there is
the proverbial slip between the cup and the lip – proliferation of IT infrastructures and
channels do not ‘automatically’ contribute to democratization in terms of greater
informational communality and exchange. This necessitates a thorough reality-check – both
in terms of discursive formations and in terms of concrete manifestations.

Finlay (1987), in his research on the discursive critique of IT, traces the roots of the rhetoric
and hype. Following James Carey and John Quirk who sought to demythologize the rhetoric
and dismantle the fetishes of communication, Finlay (1987: 8) states the following:

If we could talk to the information society, we would ask it: “Does the communications
society/revolution really exist?’ It, of course, would answer: ‘Yes’. But this would be an answer
given from within an already technologically-biased society. One would have to wonder
whether this revolution really existed or whether the society were trying to bring it about. One
simply cannot take the answers…at face value when technology is concerned.

Noting that discourse is not necessarily an accurate reference to, or reflection of, reality,
Finlay (1987: 9) proceeds:

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“How” we speak becomes just as important as, if not more than, the content of “what” we
say. Social communication is not merely a content, a set of messages, but rather first and
foremost a set of ways and rules of interacting, the “how” of communication […] For example,
if we wish to know something about the power relations that will characterize society with the
advent of new communications technology […] we must look at who has which rights to
speak and to dictate to others how they may speak at various levels of society […] We must
first investigate actual practices of power as practised in and mediated by communicational
interaction.

As far as power relations in the IT problematique are concerned, Finlay’s theoretical

exposition finds concrete form in a comprehensive report on Inclusion in the Information
Age: Reframing the Debate (2001: 12-3), which advocates a reorientation of some of the key
concepts and strategies used by the policymakers – literally, the powerful communicators. In
explicating the need for the report he explains the ‘dangers of digital divide’, in the following
way:

For those who see the divide as a problem…existing problems of wealth and community
stratification may be intensifying or radically changing their appearance and nature. For every
new Silicon Valley, numerous communities are left behind. And the problem is not only an
increase in the already enormous disparities. There is a significant threat to the currently
viable, but digitally impoverished, working class and middle class communities. These
communities are in danger of joining the ranks of the left-behind […] It is unclear whether the
transformation can continue when a significant portion of the population is not participating.

Those concerned with the fate of developing societies, in particular, would be disturbed to
know that this introspection pertains to a developed country – the US. For the policymakers
of the developing countries it is highly instructive, as a timely warning against growing IT-
philia – a dangerous trend in view of the fact that the choice between the provision of basic
needs and the development of IT is a false dilemma.

The key issues in inclusionary IT deployment are meant to be access and participation. In
the first case, specifically, the frequent promises of ‘universal access’, do not have much
traction unless simultaneous efforts are made to make such access meaningful in the life of
the ordinary people by raising the bar vis-à-vis the baseline of human development. In the
second case, regarding participation, because nothing can be ‘stage-managed’ from the top
forever, not even with the best rhetoric and hype, what is required is popular
conscientization. It necessarily follows that since in the name of e-governance there are
practices of selective, if not exclusionary, access, the hype about ‘popular participation’ is
essentially reduced to pseudo-participation – non-participation in the name of participation.
IT has a special propensity to be ‘coopted’ in the hyped discourse because it can be
interpreted easily as a ‘specialized domain’ by the powers that be. As a consequence, a

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superordinate-subordinate relationship based on ‘we know IT better than them’ stance

subverts the claims of access and participation, thereby mystifying IT all the more.

My ongoing study2 of Common Services Centres (CSCs), the ‘easy, direct, cost effective’ IT-
enabled front-end delivery points being set up by the Government of India since the year
2006 under the Public Private Partnership mode with the promise of promoting rural
entrepreneurship, reveals a huge gap between role-expectation and role-performance. This
is despite the assurances of ‘good governance’, ‘empowerment’, ‘equal opportunity’, ‘human
development’ ‘income/employment generation’ in the Guidelines for Implementation of the
Common Services Centres (CSC) Scheme in States (2006). The CSCs, with a few scattered
exceptions, have become neither efficient delivery points nor effective ‘change agents’. While
there are a number of factors responsible for this gap the fundamental reason is the failure
to ascertain the ‘felt needs’ of the local people in their respective localities. Interaction with
different categories of respondents – from stakeholders to supposed end-users – reinforces
the point that in the IT policy-based epistemic and discourse communities, technology is
accorded a greater priority than information. As a consequence, the value of information as a
‘raw material’ is underestimated in two ways:

1) underestimation of information residing with people, which they seek to disseminate

to others, including the policymakers and

2) undermining information the people lack completely or partially, which they seek to
receive from other sources, especially from the policymakers.

Thus, respondents in the Darjeeling Hills inform that the CSCs are of ‘little use’ unless they
provide relevant information about better production and marketing of oranges and better
ways of tea cultivation.

Politics, to reiterate, has a key role in reversing the trend. The greatest virtue of politics is its
inherent urge to nurture discontent, differences, diversity and dissent. Notwithstanding
periodic assertions to the contrary – including the one, now very popular among the Indian
politicians of all ideological hues, that ‘we would usher in IT Revolution without politics’ –

2
The ongoing study (from September, 2009 to July, 2010), which has a major but not exclusive focus on the
front-end information service kiosks in the state of West Bengal, and an earlier study of the same in West Bengal,
Sikkim and Andhra Pradesh (2005-2006) was based on a representative sample dervived from household survey
data. The methodology was based on semi-structured questionnaires for various categories of stakeholders and
clients, and focus group interviews for clients. The details of the titles of the studies and of the sponsors are
provided in the Acknowledgements section.

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politics never ceases to exist. First, because dissent and conflict remain at the ground-level,
especially in thoroughly inequitable societies, even if they fail to be noticed by the rulers at
the top. Second, even the most subtle acts of depoliticization are inherently political acts.
Nevertheless, there are instances, though rare, of governance in which a conscious attempt
has been made to ‘politicize’ the IT policy in a developing country. The following section
illustrates this drawing on the experience of Brazil3.

BRAZIL SHOWS THE WAY

According to the report Measuring the Information Society 2010 (2010), Brazil’s ranking is
60th while that of India is 117th. The ‘giant’ India, a supposedly potential economic
superpower, is preceded by such ‘dwarfs’ as Ghana, Swaziland, Namibia, Gabon and
Nicaragua. The respective rankings of the countries in the report are based on a number of
technological criteria in which, as the ranking shows, India, notwithstanding the huge IT
hype, is on the lower rung, considerably behind Brazil which is at best on a middle rung. But
such a ranking does not tell the story. From an organic perspective in which the notion of
the Information Society has to be ‘rooted’ in the concerned society with ordinary people
treated as ‘end users’ and also fundamentally as ‘actors’ in the decision-making process vis-
à-vis public policy on IT, such technical data remain partial. They do not reveal the complex
but necessarily deliberative path Brazil sought to politicize IT policy by taking various
segments of society into account – as compared to India’s top-down ‘trickle-down’ approach.

One of the main planks of Brazil’s construction of the Information Society is to make use of
IT’s potential to break down spatio-temporal barriers to ensure greater economic and
technological dynamism. Two very important meetings and their Declarations – the
Florianapolis Declaration (2001) of the Regional Information Society Programme Meeting,
20-21 June, 2001 and the Itacuruca Declaration (2000) of the Information Ethics 2000
Meeting, 26-27 October, 2000, reveal Brazil’s approach in this regard. The first mentions that
information and communication are the central pillars of the global knowledge-based
economy and society, and that they require to be ‘redefined’ in the way in which countries
position themselves in the world economy. It specifically mentions that the evolution of an

3
The section draws upon: D. Sinha, “The Construction of Information Society in Brazil and India: A Comparative
Perspective”. The English version is unpublished the French version has been published in Michel Sauquet (ed.)
(2004) L'idiot du Village Mondial , Brussels/Paris: Alliance-Luc Pire-Charles Leopold Mayer, pp. 301-14.

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Information Society ‘guided solely by market mechanism entails the risk of an amplification
of the social gaps existing within our societies’. The declaration identifies education, health,
job opportunities, eradication of social marginality, establishment of citizen participation,
transparency in administration and more open and democratic societies as areas to be
influenced by the democratic diffusion of IT. The Itacuruca Declaration reflects the
expectation of Latin American (and Caribbean) countries to become ‘full-fledged members of
the Information Society with efficiency, equity and sustainability’. It also refers to the
‘deepening social inequalities within the (developing) countries’ and ‘international asymmetry
between the developed and the developing countries’ which tends to ‘deny access to the
knowledge at stake’.

In terms of ‘domestic’ efforts at constructing an IT-friendly inclusive society, Brazil has also
devised a National Information Society Plan (NISP), which is intimately connected to the
ambitious Avanca Brasil (Advance Brazil) Development Plan. The major goal of the NISP is to
integrate, coordinate and foster actions for utilization of IT and, in turn, to contribute to ‘the
social inclusion of all Brazilians in the new society’. The idea is to ensure that the technical
leap forward has results in terms of human, ethical and economic development. More
important in our context, the NISP calls for the creation of:

1) a more just society based on preservation of cultural identity and wealth of

diversity
2) a sustainable development path that respects differences and promotes
regional equality
3) effective participation of the society in the process as the prime requirement
of political democracy

In this context the publication of the Information Society in Brazil: Green Book (2000), which
is widely considered to be the main reference point for the construction of an IT-inclusive
society in Brazil, also assumes importance. In his Presentation, the then Minister of State for
Science and Technology, Ronaldo Mota Sardenberg, notes (Green Book, 2000: v) that the
report has been created with a conscious effort to ‘fuel a debate’ among the political leaders,
bureaucrats, business community and other concerned segments of the Brazilians. The
minister implores civil society to come forward and involve itself in debates and deliberations
‘to establish clear political lines of action to be followed’ and ‘to develop strategic activities’.
It mentions that the government and civil society ‘must work together in order to assure the
prospect that positive aspects of such a society ‘effectively benefit all Brazilians’.

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The NISP it identifies a number of key areas in which government-to-people interactions are
to be encouraged. They are: expansion of e-commerce, promotion of small and medium
business, incentives to entrepreneurial spirit, employment opportunities, education,
transparent, citizen-centric public administration, sustainable development, infrastructural
development and preservation of cultural identity. The number of items mentioned relates to
Gunawardene’s ‘wish list’ for a democratizing IT scenario in Sri Lanka.

In Brazil the civil society has responded to the call of the state. Thus, for instance, the
members of academia are active participants in projects and schemes related to IT
deployment and in ongoing debates. There is the instance of the Knowledge City Project,
conceptually inspired by the ideas of French sociologists, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello,
and moderated by the University of São Paulo, the project seeks to create an extensive
digital network involving education institutions (including elementary, primary and secondary
schools, research institutes and public and private universities), non-governmental
organisations (NGOs), the corporate world, banks, the media and various governmental
organizations (Schwartz, n.d.). The main objective of the project is to explore new forms of
knowledge production and distribution through ‘intelligent and competitive use of IT at the
community-level’. Schwartz elaborates by arguing that in order to face the challenges, the
role of networks must be stressed and their communitarian, public nature should be ranked
first among the organizational features of the emerging development paradigm. In this way
new regulatory controls and the grassroots development of networks work as ‘antidotes for
the ultraliberal approach’ to capitalism. Schoonmaker (2007: 999-1020) meticulously scripts
the role of Brazilian software policy, especially since late 2003, as a form of ‘globalization
from below’ that challenges the historical dominance of the global North by developing new
forms of digital culture and digital inclusion, and opens up what she terms the ‘prospects for
alternatives to neo-liberal globalization’.

In terms of devising the means of access and participation with a view to constructing an
inclusionary Information Society, Brazil seems to be playing the role of a pioneer in the
developing world. In India very little if any evidence is available to suggest that the
policymakers — be they at central or at regional and local levels – are willing to do the same.
Nor is there a widespread and sustained involvement of academics in the scrutiny of official
slogans like IT for all by 2008 (the date has expired!) and IT for the Masses. While there are
scattered individuals and organizations advocating free and open source software
movements in India there is no concerted effort to make it broadly based by relating these

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to information literacy and digital inclusion. It follows that in the world’s largest democracy,
which claims to be making a transition from the representative variety to the participatory
variety, there is little sign of debate on how IT is ‘talked about’. It is precisely because of this
that a repositioning of social scientists, not the least from the developing world, becomes
extremely significant – a point I shall take up subsequently.

BEYOND SCRATCHING THE SURFACE

Can IT contribute to economic development? In an essay critiquing public policy and the
academic literature for frequently touting ‘substantial progress’ in bridging the digital divide,
Gillis and Mitchell (n.d.) argue that if increased IT deployment leads to greater digital
opportunities, including economic and human development, it can be framed and applied as
a potent tool in reducing poverty, extending health services, expanding education
opportunities and improving the quality of life for many of the world's disadvantaged. But
they qualify this by adding that such framing should recognize that these desired outcomes
are only plausible when the process is accompanied by concurrent public policies supporting
equitable access. Their conclusion: ‘IT is an important tool but not a solution in itself for
economic or social problems’.

There is little doubt that the power of IT needs to be harnessed to facilitate a transformation
of the economy, and more broadly, the lives of the ordinary people in developing countries.
But analysts sometimes overemphasize this point, proclaiming IT as a liberating
phenomenon. A typical illustration is an essay by Chowdary (2002: 3886-89) in which the
author celebrates the fact that the IT industry in India has emerged in the ‘post-1992’
period, that is, in the era of liberal economic reforms. Two major observations guide his
analysis: i) that the IT industry is free from governmental control and ii) that it is mainly
based on the market overseas. Both of these claims are wrong however. First, the IT
industry in India is not free from governmental regulations; aside from the fact that the
private players operating in the IT industry in India need the approval of the government to
enter the market, one has to remember that even the privatization of telecommunications in
India is an act or policy of the government. Second, the fact that the IT industry has
substantial overseas connections does not indicate that it is a ‘liberated’ industry. It is naive
to detach IT from global capital and its search for a market.

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IT’s so-called liberation is even more difficult to conceive of because effective dissemination
of IT is conditioned by the economic, political, social and cultural milieux of a specific society
and locality where it is made. IT-enabled development is part and parcel of the society-led
development process and if the latter falters it is inevitable that the former will magnify,
rather than diminish, inequality. In criticizing the third world’s obsession with satellites as a
sort of ‘cure-all’ device, Jayaweera (1985: 57) warns that if policymakers fail to realize that
the causes of poverty are mostly structural, a ‘massive injection’ of communication into an
unequal structural relationship most likely will help to consolidate and deepen existing
inequality. In more specific terms, IT can acquire greater and meaningful reach only in
relation to the extend of people’s awareness of it, the scope of its utilization by end-users,
the availability of material and human resources, the institutional capacity, and the nature
and extent of political will and administrative commitment. In brief, IT development does not
occur in vacuo.

Thus, there is nothing spontaneous about IT. In terms of its historical antecedents, the IT
revolution is part of a continuum that situates the agricultural and industrial revolutions that
preceded it. Like these revolutions, it is also bound by the pre-conditions and relations,
though not necessarily of the same kind, that are produced at the international, national and
local levels. All these revolutions are ‘control revolutions’ seeking to influence and shape the
society in which they are situated. The tug-of-war between IT and a society continues
despite attempts to sanitize the popular imagination of this process. Social scientists can
challenge this process by reorienting the dominant discourse on IT. This can be done by
means of a shift, as suggested by Sussman (1997: 263), from the ‘object-focus’ (what is
changing?) to a ‘subject-focus’ (who are the agents of change and who is being changed?).
The core concern in this kind of shift is ‘on what terms?’. Before turning to the reorientation
process from a disciplinary vantage, I refer to the Simputer debate to indicate how such a
shift can be envisaged from a grounded reality perspective.

The Simputer, ‘the common man’s simple computer’, devised primarily by the Indian
Institute of Science in Bangalore, was publicized widely, by academics and activists in India
and abroad, as evidence of IT’s potential to reach ‘down below’ to the rural poor of the
developing countries and to bridge the Digital Divide. The portable hand-held device, it has
been claimed, is not only simple to operate (with Smart Card and three AAA batteries), but
also technically efficient in eliminating the need for multiple computers. The Simputer was
meant to be a community-owned property, to be administered at the village-level by

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Panchayats (as the core institutions of rural local governance), schools, kiosks, postal
workers and shopkeepers. It also can be operated individually for personal information
management, for example, for checking the prices of agricultural products or for health
information. Most important, as part of its claim of ensuring ‘radical simplicity for universal
access’ it is said to have a ‘language-sensitive’ interface which does not require knowledge of
English or even literacy skills. Thus, in terms of its projection, it is an ideal device, a poor-
friendly piece of IT, destined to bring about radical change in the rural third world. But is it
as ‘revolutionary’ as it appears to be?

One critical assessment (McCollum, 2002) suggested that because the Simputer relies on
non-standard software it would not be able to make much headway in bridging the digital
divide. It was argued that it would in fact intensify the divide and end as a ‘frustrating
exercise’. The divide is too complex a phenomenon – marked by severe obstacles to access
by developing countries to global capital in the political economy of the contemporary world
order – to be removed by the mere circulation of a device among illiterate and poor villagers.
This critic even hints that the Simputer is so ineffective in terms of its power to bridge the
divide that the technology-rich developed countries, finding no real threat, would co-opt it
and go out of their way to produce and supply it to the developing countries, as a sort of
condescending gesture – to the extent of pushing it down the throats of its supposed users.

My purpose here is to point out that, apart from the substantive issues it raises which have
significance in themselves, the Simputer debate also has symbolic value. This intiative raises
a vital issue with respect to democratization of IT through community-level access in
developing countries. It also provides scope for deliberation on the means of localizing IT.
The latter point needs elaboration in the context of my argument in this paper.

We can also cite the instance of the Government of India’s prized scheme called Rashtriya
Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA). The scheme calls for the universalization of computer
access in secondary schools. The idea is apparently noble: to familiarize secondary students
with an essential skill. The scheme is ambitious because there are more than 150,000
sedondary schools in India. The scheme has induced a rare gesture from the Government of
India of consulting selected groups from the civil society to discuss the possible modes of
deployment. The objective of the ‘consultation’ was to find the best means to intergrate
computers into the learning environment and knowledge gathering process of secondary
school students. There are strong advocates on both sides with equally strong arguments for

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their respective stances. But if one follows the trajectory of this debate closely one finds that
the terms of the debate are confined to a debate about computers in classrooms versus
computers in labs (Trucano, 2009). What is not discussed is the point that in a largely rural
society like India there are a large number of secondary schools sctattered across 600,000
odd villages. Many of these village-based schools lack most of the basic infrastructure
facilities such as an adequate number of classrooms and many also suffer from a lack of
availablity of computer-literate teachers. India is a country in which IT projects abound but,
as stated earlier, there is a complete absence of IT literacy initiatives. No less important,
‘universalization’ of access to IT is supposed to take place in India where even after six
decades of independence has yet to universalize primary education, and which is still
tempting a large number of children to attend primary schools by offering the mid day meal
scheme.

That globally-sourced IT needs to be localized to ensure access, participation and inclusion is

an argument that is fast gaining ground. In this case localization implies adaptation of IT in
terms of resources, skills, knowledge (and I would add, subjugated knowledge-systems) and
the felt needs of the people in the concerned societies. It should be noted that a major
thrust in the localization strategy has been in the sphere of software – in the development of
software with local language and content, with the intent of enlisting high number of users
and ensuring the affiliation of the user-community. However, arguably the strategy needs to
extend to hardware as well. Which technology, inclusive of hardware and software, is to be
most appropriate in which locality? – that is the basic question. Unless the inhabitants
surviving on fishing in the coastal regions of a country have an IT scenario which provides
them with what is most needed – warning about impending storms – IT will have little value
in their life. It is the same for farmers who will have little to do with information kiosks if
they fail to provide the price of grains or for hill people who would take little interest if IT
does not help them in for instance, landslide disaster preparedness. If integration of IT in the
everyday life of the users is essential, localization is the best means to achieve it. The local
government institutions can play a key role in identifying the felt needs of local people and
the way localization can be accomplished for their benefit. However, in this context it needs
to be noted that despite the increasing emphasis on strengthening local governments by the
Government of India, an emphasis which has been given constitutional validity by passing
the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments, the considerationn of IT issues remains outside
the deliberations of local people.

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In India a number of IT projects are being ‘deployed’ at the local level (Garai and Shadrach,
2006; Bhatnagar and Schware, 2000) but localization remains sporadic and mainly at an
experimental stage. This is an opportune moment for intervention by social scientists. First,
because the projects are at the take-off stage with many ifs and buts waiting to be
addressed and solved. Second, the localization process is not just a technological process; it
is a social and cultural process as well – to be negotiated by and through orientations,
values, attitudes and the mind-sets of the people concerned. Localization does not simply
mean translation of a dominant language, such as English, of packaged software into a
vernacular language. It implies cultural adaptation of technology by ‘societalizing’ it. Third,
considering the fact that the whole process will involve contradictions and frictions, social
scientific interventions can provide important clues.

POLITICAL AGENDA

As the preceding discussion reveals, the problems at hand and the solutions that are needed
are profoundly political. They are political in the sense that they concern influencing the
people and shaping their perspectives and outlook on IT so that they can individually and
collectively exercise their choices based on the articulation and aggregation of felt needs.
What might be the point of departure in the construction of such a political agenda? We
need to humanize IT rather than to anthropomorphize it. Because IT does not have
consciousness or will of its own, providing it with autonomy and agency through the process
of anthropomorphization (such as in the case of ‘e-governance is the new kid in town’ or the
‘Information Kiosk is going to be your friend and neighbour’) is something that progressive
social critics need not accept passively. The first step in this regard is to give primacy to the
IT-enabled transformation process – its promises and constraints, rather than to IT itself.
Under no circumstances should it be the other way round. When such a transformation is
accorded the highest priority, analysts might sense the requirement of exploring the sources
of IT power in order to evaluate its potential. Such an exploration would reveal the global
origins of IT whose ascendance is, to an overwhelming extent, determined by global capital
and information capitalism in which nation-states, transnational organizations, multinational
corporations, international development agencies and other non-governmental organizations
play a crucial and dominating role. The political economy of ownership and control and the
simultaneous corporatization of IT in a global oligopolistic market constitute part of the
hidden transcript. However, this type of analysis remains a marginal academic enterprise.

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This is not surprising, as Wajcman (2002: 355) notes, because when efforts are made to
‘naturalize’ technical systems within the social system, studies linking power relations to
technology tend to be scarce. Wajcman (2004), from a feminist perspective, emphasizes the
need to undertake a critical scrutiny of technological interventions.

It is common knowledge that when debate occurs the core issues are problematized and the
hidden dimensions are gradually revealed. As a result, the distinction, if any, between the
appearance and what lies beneath, emerges. Do social scientists have such an agenda in a
country like India? If not, can we afford not to have one? These questions are worth
considering because they give credence to the quest for relevance which has become a
nagging issue for social scientists in the developing countries, including those of South Asia
(Chatterjee, 2002: 83-95) and India (Sethi, 2000; Mathew, 2001). However, the main
scenario is different. Acting as a ‘client community’ of the state and/or as ‘sponsored
conscientizers’ for some NGOs, social scientists are under pressure to adopt a ‘policy-
orientation’ which more than not implies uncritical support for policymakers and/or non-state
actors. In the process, the change-orientation is lost. In the name of offering interpretations
of ‘reality’, these social scientists tend to confine themselves to micro-level cases, thereby
rendering broader, integrated perspectives unfashionable. Thus, on IT-enabled development
the overwhelming majority of material produced offers either uncritical promotion of ‘IT
power’, or at best, develops an internal critique in which the main parameters of the process
remain unchallenged with only superficial limitations highlighted. This kind of disengagement
coincides with a steady decline in normative theorizing in the social sciences and with an
overwhelming output of (crude) empirical studies of a technocratic nature. Hamelink (1998:
64-76), in his critique of scholarly efforts to forecast the future social effects of IT, laments
that such works do not offer a theoretical perspective on technology-society interactions that
could provide the basis for understanding their future articulations. He further notes that by
disguising the basic theoretical flaw in sophisticated forecasting techniques, the exercise is
revealed as being ‘no better than ancient astrology’ (Hamelink, 1998: 65). I would also
underline the point that the failure to make critical interventions in the prevailing IT scenario
is self-defeating for social scientists, at least for those who wish to explore possible avenues
for humane, participatory and equitable development in a world that is being vertically split
between the rich and the poor.

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CONCLUSION: THE TAKE-OFF IMPERATIVE

Inclusion is too complex and serious an issue to be left to rhetoric and hyperbole. To reverse
the trend there is a need for social scientific intervention. To reverse the politics of
depoliticization and to develop an inclusionary perspective, social scientists, therefore, have
to come together to put a premium on shared learning and the exchange of experience
through cross-disciplinary dialogue. In such a dialogue, the analysis of the wider political,
economic, social and cultural structures and processes in which IT is inextricably embedded,
must hold centrestage. The cross-disciplinary nature of such a dialogue is to be distinguished
from a so-called interdisciplinary approach in which only selective and limited points of
contact are made between the ‘core’ discipline and ‘other’ disciplines. Social scientific
analyses – infused with a change-orientation, armed with the notions of rights, justice,
communicative action, deliberative democracy and so forth, and no less important, infused
with the zeal to provide a better deal for the developing countries in technological
development – need the combined input of political scientists, economists, sociologists,
anthropologists, historians and scholars of management, public administration and
communication studies among others. They need to perform a dual task: first, to devise
relevant methodologies for critical areas of inquiry; and second, to prevent IT from being
hyped as an ‘autonomous’ phenomenon and to reclaim a space for the political. In the field
this endeavour must be complemented by initiating an IT-literacy movement to overcome
unnecessary optimism or pessimism about IT. In short, the organization and mobilization of
intellectual capital are essential to prevent ‘hi-tech’ hyperbole and fantasy which seek to
enforce closure on critical public evaluation by branding critical assessments as ‘neo-Luddite’
and/or ‘technophobe’ and by dismissing a large number of unaffected people as ‘laggards’.

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Acknowledgements

This paper draws some relevant points from the author’s two projects: mainly, Towards Inclusive e-
Governance: Comparing West Bengal with Select Indian States, funded by the University Grants
Commission, India, under the DRS Programme (Phase I, 2005-2006) of the Department of Political
Science, Calcutta University, and partly from an ongoing project (2009-2010), sponsored by the Ford
Foundation India and Calcutta Research Group, entitled Development and E-Governance: Reflections
on India’s Democratic Experience. The author acknowledges his debt to the authorities of Calcutta
University, Calcutta Research Group and Ford Foundation India, and the discussants and participants
in the project-related workshops for their questions, comments and suggestions. Not the least, the
author also acknowledges the comments and suggestions of two anonymous referees who read an
earlier draft of the paper. Usual disclaimers apply.

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subject to review and approval by the Editors and will be given an ISSN.

An advantage of the series is a quick turnaround between submission and publication. Authors retain
copyright, and publication here does not preclude the subsequent development of the paper for
publication elsewhere.

The Editor of the series is Robin Mansell. The Deputy Editor is Bart Cammaerts. The editorial board is
made up of other LSE academics and friends of Media@lse with a wide range of interests in
information and communication technologies, the media and communications from a variety of
disciplinary perspectives (including economics, geography, law, politics, sociology, politics and
information systems, cultural, gender and development studies).

Notes for contributors:

Contributors are encouraged to submit papers that address the social, political, economic and cultural
context of the media and communication, including their forms, institutions, audiences and
experiences, and their global, national, regional and local development. Papers addressing any of the
following themes are welcome:

• Communication and Difference

• Globalisation and Comparative Studies
• Innovation, Governance and Policy
• Democracy, Politics and Journalism Ethics
• Media and Identity
• Media and New Media Literacies
• The Cultural Economy

Contributions are welcomed from academics and PhD students. In the Michaelmas Term each year we
will invited selected Master’s students from the preceding year to submit their dissertations which will
be hosted in a separate part of this site as ‘dissertations’ rather than as Working Papers. Contributors
should bear in mind when they are preparing their paper that it will be read online.

Papers should conform to the following format:

• 6,000-8,000 words (excluding bibliography, including footnotes)

• 150-200 word abstract
• Headings and sub-headings are encouraged
• The Harvard system of referencing should be used!
• Papers should be prepared as a Word file.
• Graphs, pictures and tables should be included as appropriate in the same file as the paper.
• The paper should be sent by email to:

Dr. Bart Cammaerts, Deputy Editor, Media@LSE EWP-Series (b.cammaerts@lse.ac.uk)

Department of Media and Communications
Houghton Street
London
WC2A 2AE

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Editorial Board Members:
Chrisanthi Avgerou Anne Barron
David Brake Bart Cammaerts
Patrick Dunleavy Rosalind Gill
Clare Hemmings Sonia Livingstone
Robin Mansell Andrew Murray
Diane Perrons Andy Pratt
Danny Quah Margaret Scammell
Andrew Scott Raka Shome
Leslie Sklair Shenja Vandergraaf
Robert Wade Edgar Whitley

ISSN: 1474-1938/1946

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