Making the user friendly: the ontological politics of digital data platforms

ABSTRACT

Mapping India’s vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India’s Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified District Information System of Education (U-DISE), has set out to do. This digital platform must persuade actors in India’s 1.5 million schools to regularly upload trustworthy data to populate the database. A range of actors must be cajoled into becoming data-informed, to plan and strategize, and to enforce accountability. This paper traces how U-DISE attempts to impose its desires on a range of distributed actors, and how these actors respond to its overtures. Using concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS), and based on interviews with the designers of U-DISE, central and state government officials, school-level data coordinators and NGOs and activists, as well as policy documents and government websites, we argue in this paper that, to realise their ambitions, digital platforms not only aim to be ‘user friendly’, but also engage in efforts to make the user friendly.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital data platforms
• configuring the user
• global metrics
• SDG4
• Indian education reforms
• system design
• agency
• governance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This paper is a contribution to the special issue ‘Critical studies of digital education platforms’ (Decuypere, Grimaldi & Landri, eds.). This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. NUEPA (National University for Educational Planning and Administration) is now known as NIEPA – The National Institute for Educational Policy and Administration.

2. Translated from Hindi to English by the authors.

3. This is the number for all students in India. The number for children in Grades 1–7 would be smaller.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DE170100460].

Notes on contributors

Radhika Gorur

Radhika Gorur is an Associate Professor at Deakin University, and a Director of the Laboratory of International Assessment Studies. Engaging in the fields of sociology of quantification and critical data studies, she explores the social and political lives of data and metrics and the practices of accountability in education.

Joyeeta Dey

Joyeeta Dey is currently employed as a research associate by the University of Melbourne for a project on an equity focussed education policy in India. She has previously worked on a DFID-ESRC funded project titled Researching Accountability in School Education (RAISE).