The PC in an Indian urban slum: enterprise and entrepreneurship in ICT4D 2.0
Nimmi Rangaswamy, Sumitra Nair · Information Technology for Development · 2012
This paper examines the embedding of information and communication technology (ICT) tools in everyday practices among underserved populations in urban India. Using ethnographic investigations of PC-aided micro- and small enterprises (MSEs) in a low-income slum neighborhood in Mumbai, it pursued three broad research goals: first, to etch out organic ICT immersions in underserved technology environments; second, to articulate a new and evolving socio-technical system in an urban slum ecology; third, to seek a fit between goals of ICT for development and impacts of PC-aided enterprise on ICT access and adoption. Based on the ICT4D 2.0 approach interrogating the technology-for-development discourse, this paper substantiates the need for a “new view of the world's poor: one that views the poor not as passive consumers but agile agents and innovative producers of ICT products and services.”