Making the user friendly: the ontological politics of digital data platforms

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mapping India’s vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India’s Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified District Information System of Education (U-DISE), has set out to do. This digital platform must persuade actors in India’s 1.5 million schools to regularly upload trustworthy data to populate the database. A range of actors must be cajoled into becoming data-informed, to plan and strategize, and to enforce accountability. This paper traces how U-DISE attempts to impose its desires on a range of distributed actors, and how these actors respond to its overtures. Using concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS), and based on interviews with the designers of U-DISE, central and state government officials, school-level data coordinators and NGOs and activists, as well as policy documents and government websites, we argue in this paper that, to realise their ambitions, digital platforms not only aim to be ‘user friendly’, but also engage in efforts to make the user friendly.