Cyber kiosks and dilemmas of social inclusion in rural India

Abstract

Enhanced deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is considered as a major factor in eliminating vestiges of feudal social organization and hierarchies in rural Asia, and a techno-development paradigm of social change inherited from the industrial era is envisioned. South Asia has particularly witnessed massive proliferation of civil-society-based development initiatives to demonstrate ICTs’ potential to provide unprecedented social and economic opportunities for vulnerable groups such as women and marginalized communities. Social exclusion is often understood as a matter of lack of awareness and inappropriate project design, and incorporation of gender concerns ‘from the very beginning of the project design’ is suggested as a more or less universal solution for enhancing participation. This article challenges this conventional wisdom and argues that civil society’s engagement with ICTs has not been successful in bridging the social divides it attempted to address. The patterns of ICTs’ deployment and control in the rural setting tend to reinforce existing social divides and, in certain cases, create new divides. The participation of women and the underprivileged in these projects is abysmally low and this is in striking contrast to the projected image of these initiatives as being overtly sensitive to issues of gender and social divisions. The article argues that the question of inclusion is better understood when addressed as a matter of structure rather choice.