Abstract:-
Academic literature has substantiated the image of the Indian Administration as cumbersome, ineffective, corrupt, and even uncaring. An image that the government of India is trying to fix for the past 15 years through the National e-governance plan and “Digital India” program that are contributing to the massive digitalization of India’s administration. We decided to analyze the big, layered, and complex “Indian Platform State” from below, through one of its core infrastructures, the Common Service Centers (CSCs), single point delivery centers that ensure the last mile of the Government-citizen relationship in every village of India. CSCs have emerged as a critical infrastructure to access food, health facilities, and education for a majority of Indians. This blend of public and private services is a way to experiment multiple innovations around digital payments, e-education, e-health and e-banking services for the poorest and most excluded citizens of India, CSC became a unique point-of-sale of State services as well as bottom-of-the-pyramid private services. What kind of state-citizen relationship happens in these specific spaces? How do CSC staff manage to sell both State and private services to citizens? How do people see these new unavoidable intermediaries in the village? Between October 2021 and November 2022, Marine Al Dahdah, Mohammad Javed Alam and Antony Raj conducted fieldwork in 42 common service centers in India half in the Northern State of Uttar Pradesh and half in the Southern State of Tamil Nadu. From village level to small towns, they interviewed 50 staff and managers and 250 users of CSC in both peri-urban and rural setups. Their findings converge and highlight how the Indian government is building a platform State that relies heavily on the private sector on the ground. This presentation details the day-to-day concrete operations to erect a digital giant with feet of clay