Disruptive technologies, demagogic governance: Data (un)democracy in India during COVID-19 | Preeti Raghunath | Global Voices, 12 August 2022

"...The story of India Stack is also a story of the evangelical segment of the transnational Indian technology community’s ideology. Technological determinism, embraced by India Stack’s proponents, is a unilinear idea of development and progress, which disregards others’ ideas, lived experiences and rights. It seeks to institutionalise putting more faith in technology than people. The latest case of caste discrimination by Google against Equality Lab’s Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a case in point. A strong belief in a strange mix of protectionism for the Indian technology industry and populist rhetoric and policies seem to guide much of their functioning. During the pandemic, the CoWIN app was introduced as the sole mechanism to deliver vaccination to India’s very large population. But this approach excluded much of India’s rural population; according to the Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicator Report, only 34.60 percent of the rural population have internet access, leaving many without the option of informed consent. In addition, instead of functioning as public infrastructure, activists and ethical technologists accused CoWIN of open-washing (presenting an initiative as open-source despite not meeting all criteria of openness). In this news report, activist Anivar Aravind suggested that the Open APIs in India’s current public digital infrastructure aren’t actually open and only promote government access and consolidation of private proprietary interests....

India’s focus on a deterministic and ideological usage of technology for pandemic management has not only mismanaged the pandemic, but has pushed the country to contend with Orwellian realities. India’s tryst with invasive high technology for policing as governance is eroding digital public infrastructure and consolidating control over people’s data and lives. That the pandemic and subsequent health crisis were used as an opportunity for techno-solutionism, surveillance, and control is worrying and highlights the need to pay much deeper attention to how such crises are weaponised."