The Digital Mask of Class Power (Forthcoming: “Digitalization in India”)

Reviews

Digitalization in India has not yet been published in the United States, but it has already received some very positive reviews by leaders in the field in India.

Spring, 2026

“Digital India’s Excluded Millions”, as reviewed by Usha Ramanathan, for The India Forum:

“These are strange times. The world is going somewhere, and no one knows where. The imagination is getting crowded out by promises of a future in which all problems that humans have been unable to solve are going to be set right by technology. Everything will be more convenient, more efficient, more perfect.

In this strange world, it is not the problem that seeks a solution, but what is offered as a solution that decides how a problem will be defined.

The frailties of the people will be dealt with by interfacing them with the machine for, human intelligence being wanting, artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning, general AI, agentic AI and more such fascinations will pull us up by the nape of the neck and deposit us in a place where our thoughts cannot reach.

We are tantalised by every artefact and are drawn into marking our presence in every system for fear of missing out. What we do, what we spend, how we exercise, how we eat, what we have—everything about us is of significance and goes into building up images of who we are and what we deserve. The digital is to reign. So too the creators and controllers of the digital world, but that comes as a much more mixed message—of tech czars and the world’s richest, who are uncluttered by regulation and free to experiment with the world and all of humanity as their laboratory.

In these strange times, the real world—in contrast with the digital one—is witness to poverty, joblessness, homelessness, malnourishment, illiteracy, displacement, ill health, everyday violence, prejudice, uncertainty, and precarity. Every natural, man-made, and policy disaster drags the vulnerable down further. Demonetisation, complex taxation systems such as the goods and services tax (GST), pandemics and their effect on education, and the erosion of workers’ rights add layer upon layer to vulnerabilities that already exist.

In this strange world, it is not the problem that seeks a solution, but what is offered as a solution that decides how a problem will be defined. In 2009, the Unique Identification (UID) project was marketed as a solution to corruption, leakage, and the wastage of public funds. Every person had to be uniquely identified, de-duplicated, and required to prove to the system that they were not a ghost before they could avail of any assistance from the state.

But the problem of corruption and the siphoning off of huge sums of public money was happening through the unholy nexus of political figures, bureaucrats, and corporate leaders. The names are familiar: Harshad Mehta, Abdul Karim Telgi, Sahara, Satyam. Or Vyapam, where witnesses simply died, one after another—around 40 at one count. This is a shrivelled list of what could fill a volume.

And yet, even as this project was held out as the answer to corruption, when asked what the systemic answer to corruption was, Nandan Nilekani—the project’s voice and face—had this to say: “First of all, we need to distinguish retail corruption from wholesale corruption. Retail corruption is the millions of small transactions where people go to get a service and have to pay … for consuming that transaction, right?” Things like getting a pension, rations, or a birth certificate.

“Wholesale corruption, on the other hand, happens at a macro scale. It happens in land, spectrum, or natural resources …. So, wherever the government is at a macro level a buyer, a seller, a regulator”—leading to corruption and crony capitalism. Let us separate the two, he said. “I think the Aadhaar role is really on the retail corruption side. It can’t solve the other one, the big stuff.”

They [the chapters in the book]bolster what has been appearing in reports and surveys over the past decade, consistently showing that identity, digitisation, digitalisation, and datafication have not delivered what was claimed.

Therein lies the explanation for the significant subtitle of this book of essays on digitalisation in India: “The Class Agenda”. What has happened in the 15 years when digitalisation was expected to clean up systems, make governments more efficient, make services more inclusive, reduce poverty, and reduce dependence on the state and reduce inequality? Okay, that last was perhaps never said to have been on the agenda, but it should have been. The articles brought together by the Research Unit in Political Economy (RUPE) analyse, through field surveys and policy documents, the experience of those whom the system has so far failed to serve….

The introduction captures what the essays find: that digitalisation is being substituted for government in addressing the basic needs of the people. When services are delivered by digital means, they are deemed to have been delivered—never mind that they may not have reached the intended recipient.

“The project converts people into atomised entities, weakening the potential for collective action. With digitalisation, the ground is being prepared for the withdrawal of the state from basic services, to be replaced by corporations using digital means. And once a digital identity is created, when it fails to identify the person, it is the identity that is treated as real—not the person.”

A decade ago, these may have been hypothetical concerns. No longer, as the chapters reveal. They bolster what has been appearing in reports and surveys over the past decade, consistently showing that identity, digitisation, digitalisation, and datafication have not delivered what was claimed…..” Read the rest

“The Digital Mask of Class Power”, as reviewed by Bappa Sinha for The Wire:

“….For working-class and peasant movements confronting the daily realities of digitalisation: cancelled ration cards, deleted job cards, predatory lending apps, platform exploitation, dispossession from urban spaces, this book provides what has been conspicuously absent: an analytical framework that connects their specific experiences to a coherent understanding of the class project being carried out in the name of “Digital India.” The gig worker’s algorithmic subjection, the farmer’s data dispossession, the welfare recipient’s biometric exclusion, and the small retailer’s displacement by predatory e-commerce are not isolated “implementation failures” to be corrected by better design. They are structural features of a system that is working as intended. That the technology itself cries out for different social relations, for deployment in the service of human needs rather than corporate profit, is not a counsel of despair but a call to transform the relations of production that determine who benefits from India’s digital transformation and who pays for it.” Read more….