City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

BITS of belonging, information technology, water and neoliberal governance in India, Simanti Dasgupta

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

index present

non fiction

BITS of belonging

bibliography

Simanti Dasgupta

information technology, water and neoliberal governance in India

"India's global success in the Information Technology industry has also prompted the growth of neoliberalism and the re-emergence of the middle class in contemporary urban areas, such as Bangalore. In her significant study, BITS of Belonging, Simanti Dasgupta shows that this economic shift produces new forms of social inequality while reinforcing older ones. She investigates this economic disparity by looking at IT and water privatization to explain how these otherwise unrelated domains correspond to our thinking about citizenship, governance, and belonging. Dasgupta's ethnographic study shows how work and human processes in the IT industry intertwine to meet the market stipulations of the global economy. Meanwhile, in the recasting of water from a public good to a commodity, the middle class insists on a governance and citizenship model based upon market participation. Dasgupta provides a critical analysis of the grassroots activism involved in a contested water project where different classes lay their divergent claims to the city"--, Provided by publisher