India digitalized: surveillance, platformization, and digital labour in India

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article critically engages with the rationale of Digital India, a flagship programme of the Government of India, launched in 2015. It argues that this programme has been instrumental for the state and the corporate sector in order to steadily create a system of surveillance capitalism which collects the users’ behavioural data. The article analyses these problems by looking at the rise of platform economy throughout the second decade of twenty-first century, the demonetization of 2016 and the subsequent rise of power of digitality in the everyday life in India. The article problematizes our relationship with technology and demonstrates that India's digitalization is a project by the state and the corporate sector aimed at controlling the population by using the behavioural data, which is extracted when a person engages with any platform as a digital labourer. Moreover, the article emphasizes a complex relationship between the human and non-human agencies that emerges out of the digitalization of everyday life, and how this relationship, through the control mechanisms put into place by the state and corporate actors, enslaves the population and deprives it of liberty and independent selfhood.