Jio sparks Disruption 2.0: infrastructural imaginaries and platform ecosystems in ‘Digital India’

Abstract

In recent years, Reliance Jio’s offer of 4G services, guaranteeing free voice calls and ‘unlimited’ data streaming, lead to disruption in the Indian telecom market with other cellular operators losing their revenue and customer base. To comprehensively analyze this churn in the Indian telecom industry and its impact on mobile phone customers, the article argues for observing the entanglement of infrastructural and platform-related discourses at three levels of operation: Jio’s strategies to capture the Indian telecom market and the responses by the leading incumbent service provider (Airtel), ordinary citizens’ phone use practices and infrastructural encounters, and the government’s vision for India’s digital future. Connecting pipes to platforms, Jio made infrastructural investments (in spectrum, cell towers, and fiber optics networks) to promote its suite of apps (JioTV, JioChat, and JioMoney). Ordinary citizens relate their access/proximity to telecom infrastructure (cell antennas) to their ability to effectively use apps on their phones. ‘Digital India’ vision purportedly facilitated infrastructural growth to create platforms that would support demonetization and facilitate transparent governance. Through such a three-pronged analysis, I conceptualize ‘infrastructural imaginaries’ that are coproduced by states and citizens, and lie at the intersection of structured state policy/corporate initiatives and lived experiences/affective encounters of ordinary citizens.