118 – Human infrastructures of Tech Innovation in the Indian city
Having previously served as a cheap reservoir of raw material and “unskilled” labor, contemporary India in its neoliberal avatar serves as an infrastructural node in the global tech industry. No more is India typified by the image of the poor peasant riding a bullock cart, it now exemplifies skilled IT labor. We bring together multiple disciplinary approaches to unpack this transformation in India’s relationship with technology in the post-colonial period. We examine how globalized technological regimes are embedded in local socio-technical systems and material ecologies of casted/gendered labors as well finance capital in the context of urban India. India functions as a crucial site for the global network of backend (infrastructural and reproductive labor) as well as high-end technological production (manufacturing, engineering, and software).
We begin with a historical enquiry of Bangalore’s tryst with Nehruvian science and technology, wherein high tech manufacturing and urban infrastructure planned around the figure of the model citizen-worker, often imagined as a ‘caste-less modern’, ultimately shaped a politics of work rooted in regional political economy. Next, we unpack the casted and gendered temporality of invisibilized labors performed by “on demand” gig workers who service Bangalore’s contemporary tech workforce, which in turn is part of the global supply chain of cheap third world labor. This is followed by a socio-economic analysis of the transformations in India’s municipal waste processing industry to ponder the relationship between stigmatized labor and technology. We end with a comparative analysis of India’s traditional export-led software industry with India’s rapidly expanding domestic platform economy, focusing on how their different network infrastructures mediate distinct relations between labor and capital. Our panel contributes to the growing body of South Asian scholarship at the intersection of infrastructure studies, STS, and labor.