Aakash Solanki

AAKASH SOLANKI, then a graduate student at University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, was approved funding in April 2021 to aid research on “In Pursuit of Algorithms: An Ethnography of Data Driven Governance from India,” supervised by Dr. Francis Cody. This project investigated how digital technologies of collecting, storing, analyzing, and disseminating data about citizens and governments are transforming bureaucratic expertise and governance in contemporary India. Based on ethnographic fieldwork across federal, sub-national, and local government, the grantee analyzed how the shift from in-house IT systems and team-based work to rented digital platforms provided by multinational technology firms is shifting governance in India. The research shows how this transition displaces traditional domain knowledge — such as in health or education policy — in favor of technical skills like data visualization and platform configuration. It also reorders institutional power relations. The research further traced the proliferation of overlapping digital systems used to monitor service delivery and administrative performance, revealing how conflicting data practices generate indeterminacy rather than clarity over reality about government services. The study documents how change from census and survey data to platformization reshapes how “data quality” about government services is understood by bureaucrats. This research contributes to anthropological debates on the state, technopolitics, and digital governance by showing how new infrastructures simultaneously centralize authority and fragment knowledge. It foregrounds how digitalization — far from rationalizing governance — produces new uncertainties and dependencies that shape everyday state practice in India’s post-planning era.