A Marketplace for Populism: The Moral Politics of Digitization in India’s Informal Economy

Abstract

Digital India is a flagship policy of the Government of India to foster “economic growth combined with social inclusion.” Central to Digital India is the Aadhaar card, a biometric identification now distributed to 1.3 billion Indians, and a real time mobile payment technology, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), that has significantly replaced cash transactions. This technological transformation was imagined and implemented against the social backdrop of India's large informal economy. Prior scholarship has shown that technological promises to improve governance and economic opportunities are often not fully realized and create new sources of friction, especially for marginalized communities. Nevertheless, digital technologies have been taken up by actors in the informal economy, such as street vendors in urban areas. In this dissertation, I ask: How has digitization altered informal workers’ economic and political subjectivity, and with what consequences for their agency in the market and political sphere? How do citizens rationalize breakdowns in techno-economic promises, and how has digitization become an instrument of populist politics? I explore these questions through fieldwork across Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. While my ethnography is based in the Sarojini Nagar market of New Delhi, my methodology also includes discourse analysis, controversy studies, legal and policy analysis, archival work, and oral histories. I find that over time the Indian state has evolved into a heterogenous set of actors and institutions with competing politics. Bureaucrats, administrators, lower-level officials, politicians, ministers, and middlemen all represent overlapping components of “the state,” with benevolent, oppressive or ambiguous relationships to street vendors. Digitization of identity and payments alters the political relationship between street vendors, governing authorities, and the nation-state in four salient ways. First, digitization opens the possibility of being seen and potentially recognized by the benevolent arms of the state. Second, digital payments represent a traceable and transparent alternative to the cash-based corruption the state is seeking to eliminate. Third, digital welfare creates a personified state with direct connections between welfare recipients and political leaders rather than state services being mediated through the bureaucracy. Fourth, in political discourse, street vendors are reimagined from being subjects in need of social transformation to agents of nation-building through a digital economy that is accessible and immediate. Simultaneously, there exists resistance to the digital imaginary of the Indian nation-state by street vendors, critiques of being seen without recognition, distribution without redistribution, and duty without rights. In postcolonial India, the bureaucratic-state apparatus was strengthened to facilitate the progress of the nation and its citizens. Politics in contemporary India recasts these mediating institutions as threats to democracy. Digitization represents an effort to diminish the bureaucratic state that is understood by political leaders, tech-entrepreneurs, and street vendors as inhibiting the nation’s and its citizens’ progress.Public Polic