“Untouchable” cellphones? Old caste exclusions and new digital divides in peri-urban Bangalore

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a fresh perspective on the complicated relationship between digital communication technologies and historically disadvantaged castes such as Dalits in peri-urban Bangalore (Bengaluru), India, a city popularly perceived as India’s “Silicon Valley.” Based on interviews with Dalit household members, entrepreneurs, and political activists, the study examines whether mobile phones have been insufficiently harnessed by Dalits in the region to overcome historic deprivation, or whether they may have even assisted in the reinforcement of caste-based exclusion. The paper uses oral histories and draws from feminist perspectives on technology to demonstrate how the contemporary socio-technological outcomes among Dalits in peri-urban south Bangalore is a result of a convergence between three elements – the durability of caste in peri-urban metropolitan India, the social construction of the usage of information communication technologies (ICTs), and myopia in the conventional understanding of the digital divide in India. In the process of disentangling this convergence, the paper offers a new perspective on the relationship between caste, ICTs, and development policy. The paper ultimately argues for a re-examination of the idea of a digital divide and the development assumption that access to new technologies will further positive development outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital divide
• Dalit
• peri-urban
• information communication technologies
• inequality

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the excellent research assistance of Vinay Kumar. Acknowledgements are due to Balmurli Natrajan, Aparna Sundar, Gayatri Menon, and Anil Sethi for early discussions, and Sundar Sarukkai, Aseem Prakash, Satish Deshpande, Rakesh Basant, Bala Subrahmanya, and Nandini Chami for discussions on improving the analysis. My thanks also to Cynthia Stephen, Raja Nayak, the many Dalit political and civil society organization members I interviewed, members of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the households at Choodasandra; and to Neethi. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers, the editor of this journal, and to an anonymous reviewer at Azim Premji University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Anant Kamath is an assistant professor in the School of Development, Azim Premji University in Bangalore, India. His training is in social science and development studies, specializing in innovation and technological change. He employs an economic-sociology approach to understanding technological change and innovation processes, leaning on qualitative methods to unearth the sociological processes around technological change. He has published in various Indian and international peer-reviewed journals including Industrial Innovation, Networks, and Economic Development: Informal Information Sharing in Low-Technology Clusters in India, in 2015.

Notes

1 Dalits, or formerly untouchable castes, are situated at the very bottom of the Indian caste system and for centuries have been subjected to severe deprivation, intimidation, and violence. The term Dalit has come to signify the political identity of people who have been called scheduled castes in the official vocabulary of the colonial and post-colonial state. See Prakash 2015, 23.

2 Warschauer 2003.

3 Fully acknowledging, however, that there have been significant positive results in this regard.

4 Bijker et al. 1987; Bijker 1997 and 2010.

5 Hammersley and Atkinson 2007.

6 Bijker et al. 1987; Stehr 1994; Bijker 1997 and 2010; Faulkner et al. 2010; Wajcman 2004 and 2010; Qiu 2009; Jeffrey and Doron 2013; Ahmed et al. 2014; Lupton 2015.

7 Stehr 1994; Warschauer 2003; Bell 2006; Guy and Karvonen 2011.

8 Schilderman 2002.

9 Kamath 2015.

10 The contemporary evidence on this point includes Thorat and Attewell 2007, Das 2008, Thorat and Newman 2010, Harriss-White 2004 and Harriss-White et al. 2014, Kapur et al. 2014, Verma 2015, and Prakash 2015.

11 Heitzman 2004; Upadhya 2007; Upadhya and Vasavi 2006.

12 See Prakash 2015 for a detailed empirical treatment of this theme.

13 Hammersley and Atkinson 2007, 138.

14 Jeffrey and Doron 2013.

15 Natrajan 2012.

16 World Bank 2016.

17 Madsen 2010.

18 These are characteristics I deliberately sought. I wish to understand those households and families who may benefit from living conditions that are generally above the average for a similar caste status elsewhere in India, but for whom intense ICT engagement may not have translated into positive outcomes.

19 See Kapur et al. 2014.

20 Prins 2001; Ritchie 2003; Janesick 2014; Bosi and Reiter 2014.

21 Data collection was conducted in Kannada with the help of an assistant, and was then translated and transcribed by this assistant.

22 Jeffrey and Doron (2013) also show how mobile phones are usually the first devices bought by individuals in deprived social groups in India, sometimes even before a bicycle.

23 For a very recent instance of collective political organization around the Dalit cause in northern and central India, see Daniyal (2018). Platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook were used not only to spread messages, poetry, and infographics but also to exhibit solidarity by replicating profile photos (or display pictures) that had strong messages on them.

24 This appeared to contrast with the responses in Cohort A, of which the majority reported that there was little contact with members of Cohort C in their local area.

25 See Rashmi (2017) on how other segments of the underclass in Bangalore experience the mobile phone in rather similar ways; these would come under the “information have-less,” a concept this paper discusses in the following sub-section.

26 Prakash (2015) has elaborated greatly on the stifling of economic upward mobility among Dalits, especially those who wish to engage in entrepreneurial ventures. He provides a strong argument on how perversions in state, civil society, and market at their intersection bring about rigidity in credit access, network information access, and other resources for Dalits in urban India.

27 Chalam 2011.

28 Das 2008.

29 Duncombe 2006.

30 Harriss-White et al. 2014.

31 Kapur et al. 2014.

32 Verma 2015.

33 Saith 2008.

34 Qiu 2009.

35 Upadhya and Vasavi 2006.

36 Webster 2006.

37 Qiu 2009.

38 Halford and Savage 2010; Lupton 2015. There is also evidence of a digital divide inside the home, as domestic spaces are mirrored in the use of digital devices, creating another digital divide. See Bell 2006.

39 Halford and Savage 2010.

40 Fortunati 2008; Morozov 2011 and 2013.

41 Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003.

42 This conceptual perspective to understanding the social construction of technology is credited primarily to the work primarily of Wiebe Bijker. For instance, see Bijker et al. 1987 and Bijker 2010.

43 This is similar to a Kunhian technological paradigm; the difference, however, being that a technological frame structures the interactions among the members of social groups (beyond scientists and engineers) that are associated with this technology (with the possibility of varying degrees of inclusion among individuals within one technological frame, as well as that of an individual participating in multiple technological frames), while a Kuhnian paradigm is intended for understanding scientific communities. That is, this is a frame with respect to the technology in question, and not a technologist’s frame. See Bijker et al. (1987) and Bijker (2010).

44 Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003.

45 Silverstone et al. 1992.

46 Bijker et al. 1987.

47 Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003.

48 As Akrich (1997) argues further, designers often tend to accuse the users of having “misused” a device, in the event that the device is not technically successful.

49 Silverstone and Haddon 1996.

50 Arthur 1989; Cowan 1991.

51 Wajcman 2004.

52 Guy and Karvonen 2011.

53 Toyama 2015.

54 Toyama 2015, 49.

55 Hammersley and Atkinson 2007.

56 Castells et al. 2004; Toyama 2015.

57 See Morozov 2011 and 2013.

58 See Kamath 2017.

59 IT for Change 2015.

60 Toyama 2015, 54.

61 Kamath 2017.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this study was funded by Azim Premji University (RC00066). No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.