The Technological Self in India: From Tech-savvy Farmers
to a Selfie-tweeting Prime Minister
Joyojeet Pal
University of Michigan
105 S. State Street
Ann Arbor, MI, USA+1 734 764 1555
joyojeet@umich.edu

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I propose that ICTD in India has been defined andpromoted by an aspirational discourse of modernity that is notnecessarily tied to the outcomes of actual projects in this space, butrather exists independently and has wide-ranging implications,
including in mainstream politics. I highlight cases from specific
ICTD projects, or the way they have been portrayed in the publicsphere, to establish ways in which the symbolic value of technology
has been an important driver of their purchase in public
consciousness. Using these to foreground the discourse oftechnology in India, I examine the brand imaging of Narendra
Modi, the current prime minister of India, and propose that he bothunderstood and ably used the aspirational sentiment toward
technology to craft an image of technocrat modernizer, obscuring alonger-standing image as a sectarian politician. I propose that
Modi’s is a beneficiary of an ICTD wave of thinking in India, andat the same time, his own careful curation of an online persona
brings finesse to the notion of a technological self in politics. In
this, the citizen-state relationship is mediated by the imagination ofan enlightened, tech-savvy politician leading people who arethemselves legitimated as citizens by their relationship to thetechnologies they use.

CCS CONCEPTS• Social and Professional Topics ➝ Professional
Topics • Computing and business➝ Socio-technical systems

Mozhiyaam,” meaning “Tamil is a Classical Language,” was apaean to Tamil language and culture, written by then Tamil Chief
Minister M. Karunanidhi. It was set to music by an internationallyrenowned musician, A. R. Rahman. The music video of the song
featured happy citizens, lush landscapes, schoolchildren, andcelebrity appearances. It also had two direct references toinformation technology use.
First, a traditionally dressed young woman haltingly enters a shiny
high-rise building. She looks at the building in wonder, with the airof being out of place. The scene cuts to a room with cubicles, andafter greeting a man who has offered her a job, the woman proudly
sits at her new desk, opens up a browser, and does a search on
Google, typing in the Tamil script. The camera pans back to her
happy face (Fig. 1).
A subsequent scene shows a text message exchange between afather and a son. The father is seated in a garden outside a home inIndia, and the son is in what is ostensibly a Western setting,speaking from a luxury apartment overlooking a high-risecityscape.
The young woman embodies the modern citizen in her balance oftraditional dress with her mastery of technology. The symbolism oftechnology is glaring in its banality — in its blending into the scene
like the lush landscapes and happy children. Technology ispresented as part of the natural order of what it means to be Tamil.

KEYWORDS
Social Media, Narendra Modi, Twitter, Technological self

1. INTRODUCTION
In 2010, a new anthem for the Tamil people was presented at theannual Tamil World Conference in Chennai, in the southern Indianstate of Tamil Nadu. The anthem, “Semmozhiyaan Thamizh
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRITPjraXgA

Figure 1: Young female technology worker in the Tamilanthem “Semmozhiyaan” (Credit: Escape Artists Motion
Pictures) 1

“Semmozhiyaan” showcases the material culture of digitaltechnology — computers, office cubicles, and the glass and steel
skyscrapers of technology — in a way similar to how Latour andWoolgar, in their seminal study of the Salk Institute, showed how
objects like laboratories, instruments, and lab coats were part of theprocess that contributed to the creation and understanding of
scientific knowledge [1].
These shiny technology towers stand in contrast to the Soviet-era
block architecture typical of the urban Tamil Nadu landscape. The
photo-identification-holding lanyard worn by technology workers
in India replaces the lab coats of the Salk study, serving as material
authenticators for their access to regulated spaces hidden behindkeycard security.
This media-driven hyper-reality took hold in India in the 1990s.
Digital technology was widely portrayed as transforming India,
enabling jobs, services, conveniences, and class-transcending.
Blockbuster films featured heroic software engineers, computerclasses in villages, and television advertisements about the benefitsof e-governance [2] (Fig. 2). The Indian computer engineer was an
object of aspiration, a far cry from the scruffy Western programmer[3]. Karunanidhi himself was one of several chief ministers andpoliticians who incorporated the technological artifact into theirpolitical brands by giving away laptops at events that were staged
and televised, announcing to the public their embrace of modernity.
Much has been written about the aspirational culture surrounding
technology and middle-class modernity in post-liberalization India[4, 5], but very little has been penned about the symbolic value ofthe digital artifacts and the processes they engender. Symbolic
value has been defined as the “capacity of a perceived object toevoke reactions relevant not primarily to itself, but to some state ofaffairs which it represents” [6]. It thus comprises abstract notions
about what it means to be able to own and use technology artifacts,
and what these artifacts do for individuals and collectives. It exists
within a broader public discourse that constructs unconscious andconscious mind, and emotional life [7]. This discourse is in turncreated by conversations about digital technology in various partsof the public sphere including the mainstream media, government
and academy, down to individual conversations over the meaning
and consequence of technology in daily life.
The symbolic value of technology is notable for its constructedutility in enabling the idea of “leapfrogging” — a radical shift toescape economic underdevelopment, social exclusion, or structural
inaccessibility. The notion of leapfrogging has been central to both
the demand and supply of information and communications anddevelopment (ICTD) work in India, particularly where existingdevelopment interventions (e.g., education, poverty alleviation
programs) are seen as failing to help the people who need it. It
allows for a veritable leap, mainly in imagination and hope, out of
this context [8].
Such expectations from digital technology are traceable to a longer
history of science and modernity. Their contemporary form ties
them to socioeconomic and geopolitical changes since the 1990s,
but they trace back to the popular discourse of technoscience inIndia in which the symbolic value of the technological artifact has
been framed since the postcolonial (and arguably colonial) period
as the justifier for leadership and control in society. As with thecolonists’ case for enlightened management founded on theirsuperior technology, thus was framed the scientists’ and dam
builders’ place of pride in early independent India. The millennial
personification of this in India has been the software engineer.

In this paper, I argue that the symbolic value of technology has
defined the demand for ICTD-related projects in India for much of
the last two decades. Over these years, modernity has been definedby both the projects or technologies themselves, and the individuals
responsible for bringing them — whether they are visionaries
associated with technology, such as business leaders or scientists,or the common citizens who have desirable occupations, such astechnology industry workers. I argue that the public discoursearound technology in India has been seductive beyond just its rolein propping specific ICTD projects. It has provided the defining
vision of development and enlightened citizenship. I propose that
Narendra Modi’s rebranding and use of technology in a generalelection marks an important moment in this technologicalimaginary, in that it has been accepted as an accessible, populist,
and incontestable vision for the future of the nation.

Figure 2: Actress Nayanthara from Yaradi Nee Mohini (2008),
playing a technology project manager. In the film, she inspires
an unemployed man to reform by becoming a software
engineer. Her Indian dress emphasizes Indian feminine values,
while the ID and lanyard signify her access to the economic andintellectual productivity of the tech industry (Credit: RK
Productions)
The notion of a technological imaginary was proposed as amediated “imaginary institution of technology” [9], particularly incinema studies, in which technology was used to refer both to thehardware of production and the representation of culturalaspirations embodied in the technological artifacts [10]. I extend
the understanding of the imaginary in the ICTD context, firstnarrowing technology as referring to digital technology and its
material and virtual artifacts, as well as its imaginary as embeddedin the ways that digital technologies get talked about. Using
examples from past projects in the ICTD universe, we observe atechnology-oriented hyper-reality as it originated among elites andsubsequently moved to other socio-economic groups and pervaded
state and non-state spaces. Following this, I present the case of
Narendra Modi’s social media feed, and propose that his political
positioning with technology has a recursive and circular
relationship with ICTD, each constantly driving the other as part ofa broader technological means of being.
I use the notion of a technological self as constitutive of a way
citizenship is defined by one’s relationships, literally, to the digitaltechnologies that govern society around oneself. In this, I use both

Leo Marx’s notion of the self turned from a natural to technologicalself, driven by the mechanization of society, and Michel Foucault’s
notion of the “technologies of the self” as the ways in which
individuals govern or regulate themselves within systems of power.
The self here refers to the politician and his regulating of his own
image as a technological being, and citizens, governed and definedby their relationship to the technological artifacts around them. I
use the artifacts as having symbolic meaning, particularly of anaspirational nature, in and of themselves. Modi is not the firstpolitician to present himself as a modernizer — not even in India.
He is, however, the first major national leader to incorporate
technological artifacts into his daily being. Modi did not justpromote himself as a supporter of scientists or technologically led
development. Devices, technology-mediated communication, and aconstant flow of imagery of the leader alongside technology
replaced the old sectarian populist in Modi, one who was a lot lessdefensible in the contemporary political environment of India.

2. THE ICTD TRADITION IN INDIA
Technology-driven development in India originally focused on thepeasant farmer, an enduring image of underdevelopment. The
farmer’s financier, the rural money-lender, was the ubiquitous
antagonist. The peasant farmer was held back by the rural money
lender due to lack of ability in price-discovery — a microeconomic
presumption. ICTD initiatives in the mid-1990s offered computer
training to farmers to improve farming practice and trade throughbetter access to information. These initiatives assumed that lack of
information was the main impediment to so-called development butthat digital technology, especially the Internet, could solve pricediscovery problems. These would provide the first round of ICTD
failure cases in India [11].
Farming provided an early ICTD focus, but other domains followed
quickly. Education provided a logical domain area — in a failingsystem stacked against poor, rural schools, computers were posed
as providing the potential for fixing problems, bypassing thestructural issues of primary education. Constructivist learning
approaches (e.g., “learning by doing”) used computers to leapfrog
bad teachers and schools, and arm children with neutral objects(computers) to learn [12]. The Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT)’s $100 computer and the One Laptop Per Child(OLPC) initiative sought “to empower the children of developing
countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every
school-age child.” 2 This globally recognized effort was
accompanied by local efforts in India and elsewhere. Throughout
the Global South, computers went into poor, underperforming
schools [13].
In addition to education, health care and governance were a focus
for ICTD. This included health data [14], telemedicine andpersuasive health management [15]. Persuasive health management
was the delivery of messages on mobile phones for clinicaladherence, signaling that unreliable human behavior (e.g.,forgetting to take one’s medicines) would be offset by the neutral,
dependable digital technology [16]. There was also a neoliberaldiscourse of reducing inefficient government through ICTD. Egovernance was proposed for digital records, single-shop official
applications, and tracked electronic state communications [17]. Egovernance was a forward-looking idea championed bytransformational figures (politicians) who displaced corruption-

2 http://laptop.org/en/vision/mission/prone analog systems and enabled direct citizen interface withgovernance [18].
Valuable external forces were at play in building ICTD in India.
The non-resident Indian engineer not only played a symbolic role
for the potential of technology, but many such professionals
actively contributed to technology-related projects by serving inadvisory capacities to state governments or as part of non-profit
initiatives. As the brain-circulation paradigm of thinking about
expatriates as an economic — and more important, social —resource grew, cities like Bangalore turned into transnational
locations of class negotiation [19]. Several leading global techfirms set up shop in India, investing their corporate social
responsibility (CSR) monies into technology for poor people,
driven by the growing buy-in for the bottom-of-the-pyramidparadigm of development through corporations, and a teach-a-manto-fish ideal that focused on individualized skill-building. Aroundthe same time, research groups that worked on ICTD issues were
set up in India by HP Labs, Microsoft Research, and IBM India.
These research labs developed products and services for the Global
South but could also be conveniently located for business in India,
and conduct research in English. Such work expanded interest in
this space and rewarded these corporations with coverage in themainstream news media for the said efforts in working toward
India’s development, which served as public relations exercises forthese firms.
By the late 2000s, the early euphoria around ICTD turned to
introspection in the scholarly community working on India.
Researchers looking at India alongside the global ICTD scenario,
such as Heeks, claimed that early ICTD marginalized poor people
with a supply-driven focus [20]; Toyama proposed that technology
only amplifies existing potential [21]; and Srinivasan and Burrell
cautioned against technology-driven market price arbitration as anindicator of ICTD success [22]. Benjamin and colleagues critiqued
e-governance for new forms of corruption and social exclusion[23]. Often the client populations of ICTD projects reported interestin adopting new technologies, but Dell and colleagues showed thatsuch people would give satisficing feedback to foreign researchers
for reasons of agency or a desire not to offend [24]. These critics
pointed at lack of attention to contextual, structural factors andinstitutions, or to techno-determinism and supply-side biases.
However, the buy-in for a technology-driven notion of citizenshipand development has been consistent, growing dramatically since
Narendra Modi’s prime ministership: most significantly with thedemonetization project of November 2016, which aimed in one
swoop to remove “black money” and move the country to digitalbanking, and Modi’s own push for the Aadhaar biometricidentification (ID) scheme.
There is a distinct undertone of technology-driven modernity inModi’s promotion of the two schemes. The Aadhaar biometric ID
card scheme aims to register every Indian citizen for services, andthe demonetization effort removed from circulation the two mostcommon large-bill cash notes with the goal of reducing corruption
and digitally tracking income and transactions. Modi released andpromoted a digital money scheme called BHIM (Bharat Interface
for Money). Eponymously named for civil rights campaigner Dr.
Bhimrao Ambedkar, Modi tied the right to financial transaction andparticipation as central to citizenship in his promotion of the BHIM
app.

Like Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar worked to give rights to thecommon man through the Indian Constitution, one can expect
the BHIM app to do similarly great work through the financial
system [25].
To understand the place of digital technology in the Indian
imagination of modernity, we must look back at how the symbolic
value of digital technology has manifested itself in ICTD projects
over the years.

3. THE TECHNOLOGICAL SELF AND THE
POLITYIn India, ICTD found an enthusiastic field setting. Science andtechnology have been at the helm of a state vision of developmentthat dates from first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The study ofscience has held a position of pride in the middle-class intellectual
elite [26]. This emphasis on science was seen in both the USSR,
with which India was seen to align itself through the 1970s and’80s, and in the U.S., with which India aligned itself during the
economic liberalization in the 1990s. The early part of thetransformation toward a knowledge economy came under the Rajiv
Gandhi regime, which started opening up telephony, with Gandhi
himself being referred to as the “computer man,” but found its mostsignificant period of growth post 1991. Kavita Philip describes thisas the Indian leapfrog experience — one in which the idealized
Indian went from the farmer in the immediate postcolonial period
to the digital entrepreneur by the turn of the millennium [27]:"Indian geeks now appear as historical singularities, seemingly
emerging out of nowhere to catapult the nation to the forefront ofemerging economies in the new millennium."
During this transformation Indian engineers who traveledinternationally to work at computing jobs created a new symbol ofsocial aspiration as access to foreign education and high-paying
international jobs became increasingly available to graduates intechnology subjects. This was a change from when the vast
majority of Indians who traveled to the West for high-paying
professional occupations were typically the top graduates from avery small group of elite institutions, or wealthy Indians able toafford foreign higher education and then continue to live abroad.
After the 1990s, people from the middle classes, including
graduates from second-tier universities and small towns, foundmany more opportunities to live and work abroad as the technology
industry boomed [28].
The discourse of techno-optimism was actively supported bypoliticians, who extended the notion of technocracy into their selfbranding, conspicuously brandishing the artifact, whether computeror mobile phone. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu
Naidu was known for publicity pictures with him using computers
or appearing with people from the tech industry; he started referring
to himself as the CEO of the state, the capital of which he referred
to as Cyberabad [29]. Politicians rushed to be photographed withtech industry figures like Bill Gates each time they visited India[30]. Computer giveaways became a means of symbolic investment
into workforce development. Politicians in various states arranged
mass donations of laptops, frequently before elections, sometimes
emblazoning their own images onto machines or presetting them as
screensavers, replacing entertainment-centric giveaways like
televisions and radios with a device of expertise and selfimprovement [31].
The growth of telephony also had a dramatic impact. Within a spanof less than two decades, access to personal telephones, which wasfor generations a symbol of wealth and control overcommunications, reached the masses [26]. Images of people
defined by their subalternity such as farmers, construction laborers,
transit workers, and rural women were seen alongside their mobile
devices in a range of documents promoting or celebrating
development, to underline the new forms of social inclusion
afforded by digital technology [32]. The imagery of presumably
poor people using mobiles was so appealing that even companies
such as Getty Images and shutterstock.com that deal in stock
images had sections offering various images of farmers, laborers,
taxi-drivers or a range of unspecified South Asian faces using
mobiles (Fig. 3). In many such images, the main object of“development” is the suggested incompatibility of the non-Westernface with the technological artifact [33]. This way of thinking about
access to devices in the hands of the subaltern subject as a gaze ata new India was not just for Western eyes. It served the same
purpose for the Indian elite, which celebrated the auto-rickshaw
driver or wage worker using the once luxury devices as indicatorsof a new national modernity.
Individuals could benefit from technology without or even in spiteof the state, reinforcing the idea of leapfrogging. Aspirational
engineers left the country and did well abroad, but otherprofessionals stayed in the country as part of a fast-growing, glitzy
economy in contrast to sloth-like inefficiency, corruption, or
underperformance of government [34].

Figure 3: Image of an Indian farmer using a mobile phone(Credit: M. DeFreese/CIMMYT.)
Technology represented the first Indian industry that was seen as
globally competitive. Ironically, while speaking the neoliberallanguage and undermining bureaucratic oversight through Special
Economic Zones (SEZs), the state also subsidized the technology
sector to kick-start it. By the turn of the millennium, the rumors ofleapfrog were not overstated — they were painted onto thechanging skylines for anyone to see. In time, both the computing
artifact and its user were co-constructed in the public sphere asaligned within the terms of India’s post-liberalization move toWestern modernity [27].
The state promoted sectoral improvements in service delivery andeconomic development of the masses. A report from the Planning
Commission, India’s highest national planning agency, highlighted
this role of information and communications technology (ICT) in
2003:
ICT platforms that we have studied have been successful
in delivering a significant level of benefits to the ruralcommunities. Three traditional technologies have beentransformed by the application of ICT. Significant

results have come about through the use of ICT in these,
namely: Carpet Weaving, leather, Kancheepuram Saree
making. Both in the case of soybean marketing and dairy
industry ICT platforms have completely transformed thestructure of business providing for considerable benefits.
The ICT platforms have enormous potential to transformbusinesses, create new forms of business delivery andcreate new interaction spaces. 3
The change was underway. To closer examine how the discourseof technology manifested itself in the experiences of ICTD projects,
I now turn to a few examples from the last two decades that help
highlight this.

4. THE VOICE OF ASPIRATION IN ICTD
The Planning Commission of India's 2003 document, during the
AB Vajpayee government, titled Vision 2020, outlined a vision forthe development of the nation. The report focused on various
aspects of modernizing the Indian economy. The section on
education was written by Prof. J. S. Rajput, at the time the chair of
the NCERT (National Council of Educational Research andTraining) one of the top education officials in the country.
The present rate of economic growth can be substantially
increased if India becomes a super power in knowledge
sector and if information and technology revolutions areproperly understood and exploited. India cansubstantially eliminate poverty, generate wealth and canplay a meaningful role in the international worldorder….
He went on to explain:
A society cannot be considered a knowledge society
unless the members of the society have facilities andopportunities for lifelong learning. With the coming upof educational channel, the nation should be in a position
to offer educational programmes of various types
through satellite and computer networks. This means
there would be programmes for adults, parents, etc.
these programmes should be telecast round the clock.
[35]
Rajput’s vision was predicated on digital technology’s ability tocircumvent existing shortcomings of the Indian education system
resulting from the lack of existing infrastructure for primaryschooling, university, and adult learning. In the early 2000s, thestate was focused on promoting computer-aided learning (CAL) in
the formal education sector, particularly in schools directly
managed by the government.
Computer-aided learning was introduced in India in 1984 under theComputer Literacy and Studies in Schools (CLASS) program,which started a process of providing computers to government
schools, and a gradual trickle of technology to public secondary
education continued through the coming years. The technologicaldiscourse at the national level was expanded in 1998 with Atal
Bihari Vajpayee’s government and its initiation of the National
Task force on Information Technology and Software Development,
which made specific recommendations on introduction of
information technology (IT) in schools including schemes to lower3

the cost of computers, ease financing for computers, generatecomputer donations by corporations and non-resident Indians(NRIs), and unveil the concept of technology-enabled SMART
schools [36].
The Vision 2020 document is in many ways central to the politicalvision of technocracy in India. Drafted by the Technology
Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC) of
India's Department of Science and Technology, it was nominally
helmed by possibly the most iconic figure of technocracy in India,
nuclear scientist and former President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. Vision2020 proposed an enterprise ethic in schooling and various social
sectors, with a role for non-state actors such as NRIs and computer
donations by corporations. What emerges in these documents is not
only the environment of enthusiasm around technology artifacts,
but the specific association of the technological being with nonstate actors — a productive private enterprise untarred by the
inefficiencies of the state. Since the 2000s, there have also been anumber of initiatives to build a low-cost computer or tablet forchildren in Indian schools. Such initiatives have garneredsignificant media coverage and political patronage, often buoyedby claims of revolutionizing technology, but have had little or noreal-world impact because they have failed to come to fruition [37].
In the period following the Vision 2020 report, a number of privateorganizations started supporting various forms of CAL in schools
throughout various states in India, with corporate social
responsibility pitching into an area of massive gap in state funding[38, 39]. Organizations such as Azim Premji Foundation (APF) —a philanthropy set up by the chairman of Wipro Industries, one ofIndia’s leading technology firms — got into partnerships with state
governments to provide CAL in schools, building their own, often
parallel learning curriculum based on games, often untested byprofessional learning experts. These materials were provided tovillages in a corporation-influenced style cost-sharing basis inwhich village councils, the vast majority of which were among thepoorest in their respective states, paid for part of the expenses. 4
Within a few years, many CAL projects were disbanded. While thestate continued to support building computer centers in schools, theidea of computers being the means for teaching schooling subjects
found little success with little formal evidence that CAL helped
children get a better grasp of their learning material, or that schools
themselves were structurally prepared to manage the CAL process[40]. However, these projects had a lasting impact on how people
felt computers could impact their lives. Studies found that in thepoor remote villages with failing agriculture that had been offered
CAL projects, parents were placing their hopes on the newly
instituted computers to help their children educate themselves outof poverty and move to urban locations [41].
Bhavnani et al., studying the perceptions of technology among
illiterate persons with no prior experience using computers, foundvery positive perceptions of computers, including that "kids shallbecome intelligent through its use" [42]. The personification ofcomputers as having abilities in and of themselves was often driven
by a flat perception of what it meant “to be able to use a computer.”
I have seen my son working on the computer, making
designs. He knows how to use it in less than 1 year. You
see all these boys in the 7th standard, after 3 years oflearning English if you ask them for a glass of water in
4 The Computer Aided Learning program provided computers or

http://planningcommission.gov.in/reports/sereport/ser/stdy_ict/1
5_con.pdf

learning material to over 35,000 schools in 18 states throughout
IndiaEnglish they will run away. Even the English teacher will
not talk to you in English. — Parent [41]Children’s use of computers provided a deceptive secular vision of
flattening knowledge access because it was assumed that all
children started with a clean slate with others outside of structuralinequities. With a champion like President Kalam, himself a childof rural poverty, this logic was even more powerful. It washowever, with adults that the personification of powerful
possibilities of computers was most revolutionary. The greatest
champion of ICTD around the turn of the millennium was cropscientist M S Swaminathan, who created the Mission 2007 projectof bringing a computer center to every village of India. Buoyed by
the rhetoric of a second transformation, like the Green Revolutionof the 1970s, of which he was credited as an architect, Swaminathan
proposed the Mission 2007 project as one that would create analternative means for galvanizing the village economy and havelong-reaching impacts including reducing the possibility of social
unrest.
There is a growing violence in the human heart. While
the WSIS was in progress in the midst of a feeling of abrave new world of technological breakthroughs, themain news in the media every day was the loss of
innocent lives caused by bomb explosions in different
parts of the world. The extensive co-existence of
unsustainable lifestyles and unacceptable poverty is notconducive to either harmony with nature or with eachother. This is why the success of Mission 2007: Every
Village a Knowledge Centre is so important for humansecurity and well-being in our country [43].
Serving the marginal farmer, the very symbol of the Indian
populace, was a central driver of ICTD, with more than 30 projects
such as telecenters, knowledge portal services, and mobileagriculture active at some point since 2000 [44]. Swaminathan’svillage knowledge centers, like telecenters in much of the world,
did not last. In fact, studies have shown that with few exceptions,such as Digital Green [45], the vast majority of agriculture-related
ICTD projects failed [46]. However, the discourse of“transformation” ostensibly taken from a Silicon Valley ethic of
disruptive technology-driven change allowed or even encouraged
failure, and would continue to be extremely powerful in shaping themainstream narrative on technology and development [47, 48].
This discourse paves the way for us to discard social responsibility
by instead promoting a notion of technological neutrality as anenlightened longer-term vision. The most powerful logic of thisvision is its validation in the transformation the technology artifacts
have offered the one middle-class, now global, Indian engineer.
In agriculture, as with other domains such as health care, thepolitics of expertise associated with a digital artifact became adriver of the projects themselves. Ramachandran, in her study ofcommunity health care in remote rural Orissa, found that a mobile
device was a symbol of status for a community health worker andthat citizens paid more heed to advice coming from a mobile [16].
The rural Indian imaginary of computing was based on who one
saw using computers, whether in the mainstream media such as
aspirational urban characters, or in one’s rural surroundings such as
people in positions of relative power (officers at a village
bureaucracy, clerks at a bus station), or, as was repeatedly noted bychildren and adults alike, lead characters in movies [2]. Even inprojects that were contextually careful about how technology was
introduced, the ways stakeholders imagined computing artifacts
highlight the symbolic value of digital technology.

I’m always the first one [in the village] to implement new
methods and technology in agriculture — I haveeverything in terms of technology here. Everybody comesto see things at my place. Even Avaaj Otalo — I am thefirst one to get it in this place. So many experts andscientists are friends with me and I tell them about Avaaj
Otalo. When they are here they ask to see it and I show
them how Avaaj Otalo works. They are impressed by how
much modern technology and knowledge I have. It is amatter of pride for [my family] [49].
Another domain where the language of expectation is associatedwith digital technology, especially from the supply side of people
looking at the community of users from the outside, is seen in theaccessibility discourse. Unlike with some of the other areas of
ICTD, in which the object of development is embodied in therecognizable marginal self of the farmer, fisherman, or schoolchild, people with disabilities have traditionally been at anintersection of marginalities, separating them from the mainstream
development and nation-building discourse. The news media andgovernment spotlighting the state-of-the-art possibilities oflaboratory accessibility technology have further brought to the
public imagination the revolutionizing potential of technology —in ways very similar to the discourse on crop prices’ potential torevolutionize farming, or the OLPC’s role in fixing primaryeducation.
An example is a project of Microsoft, ‘Cities Unlocked,’using advanced GPS and smartphone technology to help
the visually impaired navigate cities on their own. It
comprises an over ear headphone or goggles including
an accelerometer, gyrometer, compass and speakers in
different parts of the headphones to give the impressionof sound coming from different directions. One simple
click of ‘orientate’ button by the user on Bluetooth
remote lets the user figure out his or her exact locationand know details of his surroundings. — “ICT for the
Differently Abled: Technological Interventions
Solutions” [50]Using the state of the art to describe the possibilities of technology
furthers the leapfrog discourse because it distances itself from whata more realistic possibility of the technology in contextual use looks
like. The gap between the theoretical possibility of accessibility ina top-shelf phone model, for instance, and that afforded by astandard, commonly used device can be dramatic. Studies ofaccessibility in India show consistently that assistive technology
tends to be expensive and its usability depends on weak
infrastructure that includes technical issues such as networks,
bandwidth, geospatial applications, and language resources, and asocial infrastructure including accessibility laws, educational
facilities, social attitudes, and the culture of employing persons
with disabilities [51].
The notion of technology fixing the accessibility problem, i.e. thelack of social and economic inclusion of people with disabilities,
has intensified under the most recent Indian government, which hasstrongly advocated the role of technology in various forms of socialand economic development. In 2015, the government of India
launched a widely media-covered initiative, Sugamya Bharat
Abhiyan (Accessible India Mission), with a focus on what it termedin business speak as three “verticals”: built environment, public
transportation, and information and communication technologies[52]. The announcement of the program has led to at least one
projzect looking at the value of the e-agriculture initiative,
mKRISHI, in the lives of disabled farmers [53].

The reality of accessibility and social opportunities for people withdisabilities is very different from that of others, with additionalpressures of inaccessible social and cultural spheres serving as
significant impediments. The drive to incorporate people into
technology sector jobs has often only laid bare the deeper
underlying social issues that technology does not address.
A case in point was the emergence of call center and transcription
training, which came to be offered at virtually every institution
providing screen reader training, and presented a means ofincluding people with disabilities directly into the tech sector seenas the country’s growth engine. This, however, created new formsof channeling, because learners were typically not introduced tocomputing and technology use training broadly but rather very
specifically for transcription and call center operations. Thus whenthese jobs declined, so did job opportunities. In the next quote, avisually impaired man who went through a screen reader training
course at a non-profit discusses the consequences of channelingtoward Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) jobs liketranscription, which were in the early 2000s promoted as a meansof bringing people with disabilities into the workforce.
There were 10 others who took training for medicaltranscription, but only 2 of us are actually doing it. The
others are either doing some other job like basket
weaving, etc., or they are studying. In software
companies like IBM, Infosys, etc., they ask for 15 years’
experience and I don’t understand why. — Medicaltranscriptionist [54]track Modi’s appearances and speeches and also communicate
directly with him by sending emails or requesting a meeting, all ofwhich could be done online.

Figure 4: Publicly posted tweet on e-Governance during
Gujarat chief ministership (17 October 2011)
The notion of a technology-mediated interface between the citizen
and the polity remained central to Modi’s purported political vision.
We found in our research into the content and topical frequency ofModi’s Twitter tweets that “technology” and “development” wereamong the top five themes of his social media messaging since2009, and unlike other themes that came and went during elections,these were consistently part of his output [55]. In addition to ICTs
more generally, Modi specifically referred to e-governance both asa reason for his successful tenure helming Gujarat and as a part ofhis vision for leading India (Fig. 4). Modi’s embrace of egovernance was performative in both the regularity with which hediscussed it and the language of modernity with which he referred
to it, as we see in this tweet from October 2011 (Fig. 4).

Untrained in using technology as a tool for basic white collar jobs,
as would be typical for sighted professionals, many such people
quickly dropped off the job market when their narrow skills wereno longer in demand. The promise of technology was underminedboth by the lack of recognition for the underlying structural
inadequacies (i.e. lack of work for disabled people) and thenarrowly applied “solution” of transcription training. The true
challenge for ICTD work in India was that the results arguably
mattered little. It was the potential that mattered. The news
coverage of a vast range of ICTD-related projects peaked rightwhen the projects began; how they ended would matter little.

5. A HOLOGRAM FOR THE CITIZEN
The aspirational environment around technology use allows us toframe the brand image of Narendra Modi as carried out by his teamwhile he was Gujarat chief minister, and eventually leading up to
and post his campaign for prime minister. Much work has alreadysuggested the ways in which Modi used social media to rebrandhimself as a tech-savvy modernizer, offsetting his previous image
as a right-wing hardliner [55, 56, 57]. Modi’s campaign chosetechnology both as a means of outreach, by creating a directchannel to the citizenry bypassing traditional media, and as aphysical artifact of brand enunciation, by incorporating imagery
and discussion of technology into his self-presentation on
mainstream and social media.
Modi was among the early Indian political figures to invest in asignificant online presence. By 2003, within 2 years of theinfamous Godhra riots, which Modi himself was indicted for by theSupreme Court, Modi had his own website boasting a history of theleader, an accounting of his achievements, an archive of events, andpress releases. His website emphasized that technology
revolutionized governance because its affordances enabled
accessibility to the leader for the connected citizen, who could now

Figure 5: Publicly posted tweets from Modi on the role oftechnology in a vision for India (21 March 2013, 14 Jan 2014)
The use of social media was a turning point in Modi’s online brandmanagement. While he started using Twitter and Facebook in 2009,
his use of social media became consistent only in 2011. It was also
in this period that brand managers were hired to work on Modi’s
media image [58], following which he used plenty of craftedwording and aspirational language in the text of the tweets (Fig. 5).
In the two tweets in Fig. 5, technology terms are used with
alliteration, with the wordplay meant to signal a familiarity withmodern business jargon. Alongside the use of language, Modi usedvisual images as an important part of his political rebranding. The
images of Modi to emerge late in his tenure as Gujarat chief
minister showed him using technology, often surrounded by othersymbols of knowledge and learning. In Fig. 6, for example, Modiappears in a pensive mood with a laptop.

Figure 8: Publicity photo of Modi in the outdoors using alaptop. (Credit: narendramodi.in)

Figure 6: Publicity image of Modi using a laptop during his
tenure as Gujarat chief minister. (Credit: narendramodi.in)
Such pictures offer a stark contrast to earlier non-staged images ofModi during public meetings, in which a strongman image wascentral to his public portrayal. Known informally as the Hindu
Hriday Samrat (Emperor of Hindus), it was typical for him to behanded a sword when he got on stage for public addresses (Fig. 7).

The text of social media messaging complemented the tone of the
publicity images. In addition to highlighting the role of technology
in the development of India, as we see in Fig. 4, Modi was able toweave technology into his campaign outreach strategy by alsopresenting it as something that could strengthen not justdevelopment but the democratic process by allowing citizens toparticipate actively with their candidates. An example of this was
his “Chai pe Charcha” initiative during the 2014 election in which
he conducted technology-mediated hangout sessions at which heanswered questions posed by voters (Fig. 9).

Figure 9: A publicly tweet advertising the Chai pe Charcha (atalk over tea) scheme from Modi (12 February 2014)
Figure 7: Image of Modi on stage accepting a sword during apublic address in Gujarat. (Source: Tehelka.com) 5
Unlike earlier Indian politicians whose technocratic claim waslimited to posing alongside technology or figures associated withsuch, or encouraging technology-related investment or initiatives intheir respective states, the images of Modi and technology went a
step further in that they showed him actually using the technology.
Figure 8 shows Modi with an open laptop, appearing meditative as
he reads a financial newspaper alongside white birds, which signify
peace; this image also shows his adeptness at multitasking because
he also has an open biography of Barack Obama nearby. The seatedimage further suggests the ability to blur boundaries between workand play — Modi uses a laptop while relaxing in the outdoors.

5

http://www.tehelka.com/2013/07/modi-epitomises-what-theother-idea-of-india-could-look-like/In addition to Modi himself, a regular cadre of supporters logged
into these meetings, thus the discussion extended beyond the oneon-one with the leader to an active conversation among citizens.
Using the casual language of a tea party, the initiative was branded
as analogous to family and neighborhood social exchanges. The
blending of the casual and the serious would eventually become ahallmark of Modi’s foreign policy approach in which he frequently
clicked selfies (pictures of oneself taken on a smartphone) withheads of government and posted them to social media, suggestinga modern, laid-back form of global leadership (Fig. 10).

one to get people to fight gender discrimination by tweeting
pictures of their daughters.

Figure 10: Selfies with heads of government in China and theUAE, publicly posted on the Twitter handle @narendramodi

Perhaps the most enduring image of technological omnipresence
during the election was Modi’s use of 3-D holograms during the
campaign trail in which trucks traveled the countryside projecting
live images of Modi delivering speeches (Fig. 11). The move
captured the public imagination, both through the mainstream press
coverage of the hologram speeches and as citizens — mostly poor
citizens who did not have access to social media themselves —were exposed to the apparition of the leader appearing and speaking
in their neighborhoods.
Figure 12: Publicly posted tweets from mid-2015 after Modi’s
completion of 1 year as prime minister (1 July 2015, 15 August
2015)
In his tweets about technology, Modi suggests a natural segue
between the values of digital technology and a leapfrog vision for
India’s development. The language of corporatist modernity that
accompanies tweets such as those in Fig. 12 proposes replicating a
Silicon Valley story (Start-Up India) as not just a pathway for theelite, but as an ethos for the country as a whole (Stand Up India).

Figure 11: Trucks carrying equipment for projecting 3-Dholograms of Modi for speeches.
Using social media regularly allowed for Modi to create minibrands around his government’s initiatives as well as ideas that helooked to popularize. The former category included his trademark
technology and development programs — “Digital India” and“Make in India” — whereas the latter included sanitation programs,
various citizen-outreach programs, and selfie campaigns, including

To this aspirational end, Modi did more than just craft tweets andspeeches. During state visits to the United States, he made it a point
to visit several major technology firms in the Silicon Valley
including Google, Facebook, Apple, and Tesla, and took part inforums with leaders of several of these firms. Sundar Pichai of
Google and Satya Nadella of Microsoft, both Indian-born andeducated engineers who became success stories at tech firms thatwere household names in India, shared the dais with Modi at events.
In this way Modi celebrated the Silicon Valley engineering culture— one populated by self-identified middle-class Indians who went
abroad for economic opportunities — rather than disdaining it as aloss to the home nation. In a series of speeches in New York,
Silicon Valley, London, Melbourne, and other global cities, Modirepeatedly referred to the notion of “brain circulation” as analternative to “brain drain,” emphasizing that Indians had madetheir mark in the global economy at the click of a mouse.
Through his enthusiastic endorsement of technology and enterpriseas a vision for India’s future, both in his direct messaging and in his
creation of an online being, Modi has emerged as a powerfulsupply-side advocate of ICTD. However, beyond his choice tohighlight this vision (instead of the more nationalistic ideal that has
been typical to the conservative right), what makes his social media
prowess essential to a contemporary analysis of technology anddevelopment in India is the widespread purchase of his message.

6. DISCUSSION
Throughout the ICTD tradition in India, we see that aspiration for
better education, accessibility, and political rehabilitation ismediated through the technological object (the classroom
computer, the assistive device, the selfie). The symbolic value oftechnology in each case helps propel the operational agenda rather
than a priori empirical evidence of the likely outcomes. This
becomes clear in the study of Narendra Modi’s use of mobiles,
Twitter, and selfies to rebrand himself; his is an example of thesymbolic value of technology in ICTD, a lens to understand theother cases. His social media persona incorporates the unassailable
ethos of middle-class modernity that has come to define the Indian
pathway to the global stage. It is a seductive logic precisely because
rejecting it would be to question the possibilities on which national
aspiration for much of two decades has hinged.
In interrogating the symbolic value of technology we must examine
both its implicit purchase, as with the expectation that technology
can fix challenges with accessibility and education, and explicit
articulation, as with Narendra Modi’s social media output and its
appeal. The problem of agency in ICTD is not that the marginalized
have been hoodwinked into accepting a vision of technology-driven
modernity. Toyama’s work, if anything, makes clear that thewealthy and highly educated have been victims of their own
discourse [21]. The allure of technology-aided development is that
it is predicated on an optimistic discourse that rests on a selective
interpretation of human and collective capabilities.
ICTD has long used theoretical frames from capabilities
approaches [59, 60, 61]. In Amartya Sen’s words, enhancing
people’s freedoms is “not just as an end objective, but also as theprimary means to achieving it.” Herein lies the primary conundrum.
Can people’s freedom be isolated from the effects of an often
misplaced discourse of technology, or is their freedom to bemeasured as their ability to appropriately read and encounter that
discourse? The former argument is fraught with undermining theagency of people buying into an ICTD vision of the future; the latterargument becomes impossible to measure. Kleine’s [62] influential
call to closely examine the object of development in ICTD likewiseuses a choice framework, which proposes that the fundamental
problem is a need for more consultation with the end users and, inthe endgame, to seek understanding of whether technology enables
individuals better ability to choose options for their own lives.
Choice frameworks do help us understand ways in which agency is
expanded, but as with other evaluative approaches, they are
fundamentally outcome-related. The issue with these approaches isthat they assume that individuals’ capabilities can be appropriately
estimated.
The difference between the supply-side acceptance of the discourse
and the demand-side acceptance is the genuine lack of consequencefor one side, which allows its alienation from the conditions of thelatter to perpetuate. However, we cannot blame everything on an
all-encompassing deception by a global popular discourse oftechnology. The extension of what middle classes accept as fuel fordevelopment into the reality of those who are socially excluded has
at its heart a willful dismissal of the structural factors that enable
the middle classes to succeed to begin with.
In the traditional ICTD cases discussed, the discourse of optimism
was widely accepted by all parties involved, even when theintended recipients fully recognized the shortcomings of their
existing access, such as the resource-poor schools or inaccessible
public spaces. The ascription of neutrality to the computing artifact
is central to the choices people articulate. With weak institutions,the state and its individual constituents are seen as unpredictableelements, whereas the abstraction of a device offers a firm
neutrality.
In many of the ICTD cases highlighted above, the symbolism of theartifact masks the weak understanding of the technology and its
affordances. Understanding what qualifies as an actual computer
education underestimates the complexity of computational work asrural parents claim “My child knows computers” based onchildren’s ability to start a computer. Likewise the gaps between
laboratory experimental technology and real-world use of assistive
technology presents a massive gap in a functional understanding ofaccessibility.
However, the most important symbolic case of technology emerges
in distillation of ICTD principles in Modi’s rebranding and constantmessaging about technology. The image of the engineer–entrepreneur as an archetype for the model citizen is constructed on
notions of knowledge and hard work rather than enabling
infrastructures. This narrative finds an exemplar in Modi, the sonof a poor tea seller and a grass-roots worker for a political party
who rose up the ranks and turned to technology as his guiding light.
This individualist ethic stands in contrast to earlier waves ofgovernment based on welfarist notions of social equity. The“evolution” of Modi on social media is also a means for citizens,particularly those publicly unaffiliated with (or embarrassed by)elements of the social conservative values of the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), to support him.

Figure 14: Publicity image of Modi, as prime minister, sittingwith a group of bureaucrats, looking at the MyGov citizen
interface (Credit: narendramodi.in)
Modi’s rebranding is emblematic of the larger aspirational logic
that regulates the citizen-state relationship. As the association withtechnology transformed the Indian engineer to a global elite, it
likewise had agency in and of itself in moving him from a social
conservative populist to a tech-savvy modernizer. In Modi’s
technocrat, we are offered the same seductive logic of change thatthe flow of ICTD projects over the years offered that anunderdeveloped population or scenario can be altered with theaddition of a technological artifact.
In Fig. 14, Modi, staring at a screen with the MyGov portal as his
bureaucrats watch, emphasizes that the leader’s vision goesoutward to his citizenry (a close look at the picture reveals a static
image on the screen). Modi’s political vision is distinct from bothGandhian and Nehruvian philosophies, arguably the two mostimportant schools of thought in post-independence India. Modi’s
technocratic vision differs from India’s first prime minister Nehru’s
in that it was fundamentally collectivist and saw big science
working for the broad social good. Modi’s hero is theentrepreneurial technologist. In this, his social vision differs fromthat of Mahatma Gandhi, whose focus of interest and intervention
was the village, and not the individual.
Herein lies perhaps the most lasting legacy of Modi in the Indianpolitical system — the creation of a technological self. This
technological self has been effectively put forth as a political visionthat works not just for the elites, but just as well for the poor. Modi,
the son of a tea seller, in his own selfie-clicking body represents thevision of success for the middle- and lower-middle-class Indians.
His success reinforces the idea, at the heart of ICTD, that a neutral,technologically assisted solution is there for longstanding social ills
— but also, and critically, that a person who represents this modern,enlightened technocratic vision cannot concurrently be a politicallyilliberal thinker because those two notions would appear to be atodds. When there was a push for cashless payments or citizen
tracking using technology, it was attributed to Modi’s vision. On
the other hand, re-emerging Hindutva political movement, which
was central to Modi’s early career and has led to the beef ban andseveral lynchings of Muslims under his government, is an issue on
which Modi stays silent, and for which the RSS along with agrowing movement of unchecked fundamentalists are deemed
responsible [63, 64].

7. CONCLUSION
The November 2016 demonetization, in which the government
announced a ban of all Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 banknotes,
representing 86% of all Indian currency, Modi used anti-corruption,and the need to move to a technology-driven, cashless economy as
the major impetus [65]. The move triggered unprecedented chaos,and Modi had to address the nation to justify the move, and ask forpeoples’ support for it. During his citizen address program, called“Mann ki Baat” (Words from the Heart), he spoke in first person,
directly to the people. Modi invoked technology, and delivered
what would make for a textbook ICTD speech.
I need your help and I am very sure that millions of young peopleof our country will accomplish this tremendous task. You just do
one thing, take a resolve today itself that you will yourself
become a part of the ‘cashless society’. Every technology neededfor online spending will definitely be available on your mobile
phone. But not only this, you must devote half an hour, one houror two hours daily to educate at least 10 families about what thistechnology is, how this technology is to be used, how to
download the Apps of your banks, how to spend money fromone’s account, how to make payment to shopkeepers. Also teachthe shopkeepers to conduct their business with this technology.
6

http://www.narendramodi.in/text-of-pm-s-mann-ki-baataddress-on-all-india-radio-on-27-november-2016--533318

You have to voluntarily lend your leadership to this great
campaign, this Maha Abhiyan, to create a ‘cashless society’, toeradicate corruption from our country, to abolish the scourge of
black money and to help people in overcoming their difficulties
and problems. Once you teach the poor people about the usageof Rupay Card, they will shower their blessings upon you. 6
Arguably, the software engineer is no longer the paragon ofmodernity, it is the average citizen, redefined by technology —whether through identification cards for all or technology-enabled
payment systems. Digital technology is now an all pervasive meansof governmentality in which the citizen subject is constantly
mediated in his or her relationship to the state through technology.
In this “post-software engineer” phase, citizenship itself is definedby one’s incorporation within a technological frame of being. From
being a political system driven in general elections by populist
campaigns anti-poverty and social equity, we saw in the 2014
election campaign and thereafter a new form of technologicalsubject — defined by a quasi-mandated Aadhaar card, mediatizedby social media, pushed to digital transaction by demonetization.
This did not emerge in a vacuum. Years of ICTD have laid theground for the construction of a certain kind of legitimate politicalbeing, and by extension, a legitimate citizen.
The problem with ICTD is not what it proposes, but what it
explicitly excludes. What questions does a technological modernity
allow one to ignore, in the name of progress, in the name ofdevelopment? Modi’s story shows not only that a politician’scontested sectarian may be seconded to his embodiment of atechnocentric vision. In this, it is not just important that Modi isable to rebrand for a new political constituency. Rather it mattersthat his new image allows an easy means for his existing votebank
to present support of the leader as attributable to his tech-savvy
credibility rather than his social positions. Modi is also by no means
alone — a host of leaders with problematic political credentials inrecent years, including Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Hun Sen of
Cambodia, have invested in branding themselves as tech-savvy,
and communicating this directly through social media.
The acceptance of the proposal for technology in place of fixing
schools or accessibility can be directly linked to the acceptance ofa technocrat, overriding his image as a political actor who for mostof his career was known as an extreme right-wing ideologue.
Technology has provided the most potent and effective symbol forrehabilitation in the public sphere. As with the pleasing potential ofa world rectified by ICTD, the story of Narendra Modi’s newfoundtechnocracy is in fact a story about those it appeals to.

8. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Kamal Kapadia, Nandini Pal, Padma Chirumamilla, Neha
Kumar, and the reviewers of ICTD 2017 for their valuable feedback
and discussions on various on drafts of this article.

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