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The politics of anti-poverty artefacts: lessons from the computerization of the food security system in Karnataka

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conference contribution
posted on 2016-10-14, 14:50 authored by Silvia Masiero, Amit Prakash
The last few years have seen a rapid increase in the discussion of the role of new technologies in strengthening social safety nets. However, the hypothesis that technology design is intertwined with political agendas - aiming at instilling specific visions and policy objectives in anti-poverty programmes - has remained to a large extent unexplored, being either taken as implicit or neglected by technical discourse. In this paper, we look at computerization of a large food security programme - the Public Distribution System in Karnataka, India - to argue that technology, far from simply affecting the functioning of existing processes, can be built to advance specific political agendas, which carry clear stances on the ways in which social welfare targets are to be reached. However, recipients? perception of these programmes depends highly on how technology affects access to their entitlements, which need therefore to be set at the core of anti-poverty technology design. The case study is used to draw lessons for policy, specifically aimed at countries embarking into computerization of their social safety nets.

Funding

This research was funded by the Centre for IT and Public Policy (CITAPP) at the International Institute for Information Technology, Bangalore, and by the Bagri Fellowship awarded by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Asia Research Centre.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

ACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Volume

15

Citation

MASIERO, S. and PRAKASH, A., 2015. The politics of anti-poverty artefacts: lessons from the computerization of the food security system in Karnataka. ICTD '15 Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, Singapore, 15th-18th May 2015, Article No. 19.

Publisher

© ACM

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

© 2015 ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in ICTD '15 Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2737856.2738011.

ISBN

9781450331630

Language

  • en