Description
India Stack is an ambitious project, described as a unique convergence of government, technology, and regulatory frameworks. Its social and technical achievements are the almost total incorporation of people in the world’s most populous country into formal economic and financial relations built on a basic digital ID system. Research on India Stack has situated these achievements within analysis of broader processes of financialisation, particularly the financialisation of development, and related patterns of contemporary economic restructuring. While digital financialisation and discussions of ‘platform’, ‘surveillance’ and ‘ID capitalism’ are useful for understanding India Stack, the contention of this paper is that more emphasis should be put on the the sociotechnical vision of the project, especially when seeking to understand the specificities of the Indian case. This paper examines the transformations at play by centring analysis of the sociotechnical imaginaries of India Stack as a state-led postcolonial and developmentalist project.
