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Finalists for the position of assistant professor of science, technology, and society will present a research talk.

Pariroo Rattan, PhD in public policy, Harvard University, will discuss "A Marketplace for Populism: The Moral Politics of Digitization in India's Informal Economy."

Why do citizens in democracies accept technological governance systems that break down, discriminate against them and fail at many levels? Digital India is a flagship policy of the Government of India to foster “economic growth combined with social inclusion.” Central to Digital India is the Aadhaar card, a biometric identification now distributed to 1.3 billion Indians, and a real time mobile payment technology, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), that has significantly replaced cash transactions. This technological transformation was imagined and implemented against the social backdrop of India's large informal economy. Prior scholarship has shown that technological promises to improve governance and economic opportunities are often not fully realized and create new sources of friction, especially for marginalized communities. Nevertheless, digital technologies have been taken up by actors in the informal economy, such as street vendors in urban cities like New Delhi. How do street vendors rationalize breakdowns in techno-economic promises? In what ways is the introduction of technology in modern governance systems changing the relationship of marginalized citizens in India to the nation-state, and with what consequences for contemporary populist politics? I draw on multi-year ethnography in New Delhi on the uptake of digitization and its political discourse by street vendors to explore on-ground tensions in the nature of the Indian nation-state and how ordinary citizens relate to it through technology. This has stakes for the nature of contemporary democracy. Unlike postcolonial India where a large bureaucracy was set up to facilitate the nation's growth, I show how digitization is morally justified and accepted by citizens through a recasting of mediating institutions like the traditional bureaucracy as a threat to the nation’s progress.