Living in a Technological Utopia
Kiran V. Bhatia · 2024
The chapter examines the Digital India initiative rolled out by the Government of India in 2015. The proliferation of the Digital India initiative in the slums of India highlights the ubiquity of the development/empowerment paradigm at the heart of tech projects and programmes designed for poor and marginalised communities. The initiative serves as a placeholder for understanding the different processes, mentalities, and actions that bracket poor children’s complex aspirations and desires and consider them empowered neoliberal subjects. The chapter makes a case that children sometimes marshal their digital practices to align with the dominant expectation to function and aspire like a neoliberal subject. However, they continue to ascribe novel meanings to their digital engagements in covert and implicit ways.