BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India by Simanti Dasgupta (review)

In this important contribution to the ethnography of neoliberalism in India, Simanti Dasgupta claims that the neoliberal narratives of public governance as unaccountable and corrupt—a position mainly embraced by the urban middle class—plausibly emanated from the success of information technology (IT). In establishing this connection, Dasgupta takes an unusual approach. She gives attention not to causality but to the simultaneity or contemporaneity of the emergence of the neoliberal polity of public governance in India and the ideology of the IT industry. She shows how the “IT narrative”—the success of the urban middle-class-led IT industry in the global economy otherwise dominated by the West—takes a conceptual leap toward proposing this as an ethico-political model for the governance of the entire nation. If the IT industry succeeded in the global economy by following ethical corporate practices (often summed up in the terms “accountability” and “transparency”) and by believing in the power of the market as a transformative tool, then this model, namely the combination of ethics and market, could also be a blueprint for the nation’s governance. Dasgupta chooses the IT company Infosys Limited, located in Bangalore, as her ethnographic site. In chapters 3 and 4 she attempts to capture the political nuances of this historical moment of simultaneity.

Dasgupta not only clarifies that Infosys is just one company in the larger IT industry, but also that the “inside” of IT is broader than the industry itself. It includes the emerging middle classes participating in a neoliberal market; IT thus serves as a metaphor for the arrival of the middle classes. The “outside” then comprises those who are unqualified or unable to participate, such as the urban poor. Dasgupta then gazes from the outside—from the location of the urban poor—into the inside of IT in order to reflexively examine its neoliberal ideology of public governance in practice. She selects a market-based, parastatal project initiated to provide water to urban poor for a payment as her ethnographic site for the “outside.” The project was designed by an international donor agency and facilitated by a local NGO, Janaagraha, whose overall mission, seamlessly merging with the ideology of Infosys, was to reform the state and hold it accountable and transparent by adopting the market as a tool.

The anatomy of the project is placed in the local and global context in chapter 2, while in chapter 5 Dasgupta opens the black box of the urban poor. In these chapters she discusses, on the one hand, what she calls the middle-class capture of the state that has shifted the politics of governance to public-private partnership and reduced the state’s role in the provision of basic services to a minimum, and on the other, the subversion and contestation of the urban poor of this middle-class capture. In both these claims Dasgupta’s excellent book is at its weakest, as the claims are based on thin ethnographic material. The urban poor refusing to participate in the privatization of water could indeed be interpreted as a contestation of the neoliberal model of governance, but it hardly constitutes a new strategy to make a claim on the state, nor does it mean “subversion to survive” as Dasgupta asserts.

The key message of the book that may be relevant for the STS readers of this journal is articulated on page 129. Dasgupta here points out a deep epistemic shift such that the state is no longer the sole agent for the delineation, production, and distribution of ways of knowing. Dasgupta argues that civil society organizations, corporations, international donor agencies, and multinational policy consultants now play a prominent role in the epistemologies of post-colonies. This epistemic shift is important. However, in my reading, unlike the dams and nuclear plants, for example, that traditionally provided legitimacy to the nation-state, IT has a limited role in contributing to the materiality of nation...