March 10, 2022
Speaker: Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and International Affairs at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
Moderator: Jennifer Bussell, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy; Director, Center on Contemporary India
Sponsors: Institute for South Asia Studies, The Center on Contemporary India
The Center on Contemporary India invites you to a talk by Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and International Affairs at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, on his upcoming new book, Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India.
About Patching Development
How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms? Political will and good policy design are critical but often insufficient due to resistance from entrenched local power systems. In Patching Development, Rajesh Veeraraghavan presents an ethnography of one of the largest development programs in the world, the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and examines NREGA's 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 strategy 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. These processes are neither neat nor orderly and have led to a contentious sphere where the exercise of power over documents, institutions and technology is intricate, fluid and highly situated. A highly original account with global significance, this book casts new light on the challenges and benefits of using information and technology in novel ways to implement development programs.
_________________
Speaker Bio:
Rajesh Veeraraghavan is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and International Affairs at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.
Dr. Veeraraghavan was a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University and was previously a Fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard University. He works in the intersection of information technology, development, and governance, with a focus on India. His research combines both the design and study of technological solutions to development and governance problems. He is currently interested in understanding the role of information and technology in making systems of governance more participatory. Previously, he was an associate researcher at the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research, India. His work focused on building appropriate technologies for socio-economic development. His work led to several research publications, patents as well as non-profit spin-off called Digital Green on whose board he serves currently. Before that, he worked as a software developer at Microsoft for several years in the US.
Dr.Veeraraghavan has a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Clemson University, Master’s degree in Economics from Cleveland State University, and Bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Management from Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, India. His upcoming classes at Georgetown will focus on information,technology and governance, the role of technology in socio-economic development and designing civic technologies to see the state.
10 мар 2022
