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Monday | 02:00 PM | Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India: Dr. Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Georgetown University, Washington D.C. (USA), School of Foreign Service How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms in the face of resistance from entrenched local power systems? Dr Rajesh Veeraraghavan in his recent book Patching Development (OUP, 2022) presents an ethnography of one of the world’s largest development programs, the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and its implementation in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. He finds that the local system of power is extremely difficult to transform, not because of inertia, but because of coercive counter-strategies from actors at the last mile, and their ability to exploit information asymmetries. Upper-level NREGA bureaucrats in Andhra Pradesh do not possess the capacity to change the power axis through direct confrontation with local elites, but instead have relied on a continuous series of responses that react to local implementation and information, a process of patching development. Patching development is a top-down, fine-grained, iterative socio-technical process that makes local information about implementation visible through technology and enlists participation from marginalized citizens through social audits. Dr Veeraraghavan’s book throws new light on the challenges and benefits of using information and technology in novel ways to implement development programs. Address Südasien-Institut Gebäude 4130 Voßstrasse 2 69115 Heidelberg Organizer Abteilung Politische Wissenschaft Homepage Organizer http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/sai/pol/index.html Contact |