Digital India and the Poor : Policy, Technology and Society

Digital India and The Poor examines how the poor are evoked in contemporary Indian political discourse. It studies the ways in which the disadvantaged are accounted for in the increasingly digitised political economy, commercial and public policy, media, and academic research.

This book:

• Interrogates the category of the poor in India and how they have come to be classified in economic and policy documents over the past few decades
• Explores the influential digital education technology ‘experiments’ conducted in Indian slums from the late 1990s, now popularly known as the ‘hole-in-the-wall experiments’
• Discusses financial inclusion initiatives, predominantly as they converged between 2014 and 2017, such as the Jan Dhan Yojana, the Aadhaar Project, and the banknote demonetisation
• Presents an in-depth study of the bearing of technology on domestic employment in India

The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, politics, political science and sociology, technology studies, linguistics, and development studies.