I would like to thank the participants of Low Tech ? Wild Tech ! for their input and an anonymous referee for comments and advice.

Infrastructure or what seemed to stand in for it, has served as the reference point for a series of debates in India in the last decade, including urban expansion and displacement of the poor, the “public-private” model, and middle class visions of global modernity (Aggarwal 2006, Fernandes 2006, Chatterjee 2008, Dupot 2011). Infrastructure has been the prime mover in debates on the Special Economic Zones (SEZ), often linked to land acquisition struggles in the urban periphery. For many years, crumbling urban public infrastructures epitomized bourgeois shame over Indian modernity’s lack of purpose and the alleged corruption of political classes. Elite discourses and media coverage of the Chinese growth model are inflicted with a kind of infrastructure envy and a yearning for a quick transition to a high-rise, spectacular urban modernity. Despite all these contradictions and despite all the social upheavals that the infrastructural turn has set up in India, the move has pushed urban discourse in new directions.

2It was only by the 1990s that technological modernization became a slogan that cut across many parts of the social fabric. India’s software boom and proliferation of media culture made the technological a necessary component of elite visions, popular common sense and curiosity. Technoculture was paralleled by national security pathologies, which has been a feature of Indian life in the past two decades. The recent initiation of massive information infrastructures as part of urban development has come in the wake of this.

4This essay reflects on the new urban turn through the prisms of land and population, both of which have demanded multiple technologies of enumeration, political claim-making and complex inscription practices at all levels of urban government. Multiple strands have fed into this emerging constellation. These include middle class mobilization in cities that have privileged information and transparency in urban discourse; anxieties about the opacity of urban informality in state elites making way for technologies of visibility. I also look at the transparency turn world-wide and the neoliberal biopolitics of urban governance, which seek to make visible both land and urban populations.

5We are witnessing a major attempt to transform the existing technologies of managing urban populations since 1947. New information infrastructures attempt to rearrange the relationship between urban governance and traditional politics, seen as expressive of a corrupt and opaque urban system. As I argue in this essay, the mediatization of Indian cities and the expansion of low cost mobile telephony have added a new dimension to urban life in Indian cities, challenging traditional modes of urban governance. The historical borders of urban infrastructure and low-cost media technology (or between nurture/welfare/development and leisure/consumption) are now increasingly blurred (Graham & Marvin 2002, McCullough 2006) calling into question the older urban ‘social’ and its forms of management. The ‘ecology’ proposed by the massive Aadhaar biometric ID is fairly straightforward about this shift as part of its rollout mandate, as it proposes to connect identification, targeted welfare, financial inclusion, and formal bank accounts with the infrastructures accessible to the massive mobile phone population (UIDAI 2010, Nilekani 2011).

6These developments in India tie in with the international expansions of information technologies and the new rhetoric of change associated with it. The historian of science Paul Edwards has pointed to the power of “rupture talk” attached to technology as the most familiar trope of modernization after World War 2, where elites and technocrats held out the possibility of rapid changes based on new technologies, a phenomenon that has rapidly increased with digital media (2011). The scale of this claim making is significant. As a recent collection points out, we are now presented the argument that all ‘data’ exists as an irreducible unit, ‘before’ the fact and where all phenomena can be reduced.

“This shared sense of starting with data often leads to an unnoticed assumption that data are transparent, that information is self-evident, the fundamental stuff of truth itself” (Gitelman 2013).

7This transaction between transparency and information plays out in this essay as modernizing elites and middle class groups came together to shift political categories of urban populations to ‘apolitical’ data sets made possible by new enumeration technologies. However, as the information historian Geoffrey Bowker points out, “ ‘raw data’ is both an oxymoron and a bad idea” (cited in ibid : 1) ‘Data’ is generated through media technologies of writing, storage, and circulation, which have to engage with neighborhood networks, bureaucratic practices, activist mobilization, court cases and expanding media coverage. In this essay I am particularly interested in the materialization of new technologies in Indian cities, and their link to an expanding media culture. In recent years there is a new conversation across the disciplines on information culture (Edwards et al. 2011), infrastructures (Larkin 2013), and the ‘augmented realities’ of urban life, where socio-technical networks and digital interfaces increasingly constitute everyday life (Graham et al. 2013). This connection of infrastructure, information and augmented reality of urban life is a running theme in this paper albeit through an instable postcolonial lens.

8In line with this approach, I begin with a discussion of paper-based ontologies that have dominated urban information infrastructures in the colonial and postcolonial period, and their relationship to practices of visibility and circulation. In the following second section, I look at the connections between urban displacement of the urban poor, information archaeologies, and the implications of middle class discourses in Indian cities that have made transparency a key vector in public discourse, including judicial pronouncements. In the next part of this essay I discuss in detail the relationship between information, technologies of transparency and urban infrastructure. Here I look the links between global transparency discourses, neoliberal ideologies and technologies of visibility and enumeration, affecting both land and population. In the Indian case these discourses have been incorporated by local middle class groups and regime modernizers, a process that assembles technologies of visibility, welfare, enumeration and national security fears. The enumeration of land and populations in digital databases is discussed in this section, including the design of the expanding Aadhaar biometric ID scheme. Finally, I examine the aporias of the informational turn, and the stakes for Indian and postcolonial urbanism.

Paper ontologies of urban governance

From the days of the British East India Company in the 17^th century, colonial power in south Asia was based on the multiplication of writing genres as means of authentication. Constant authentication and verification through elaborate official procedure materialized colonial writing practices (Ogborn 2007). As Hull (2012) demonstrates, anxieties about non-correspondence between words and things pervaded colonial and postcolonial bureaucracies, leading to a multiplication of authentication systems of stamps, counter-signature, and paper genres. Documents systems sought to collectivize bureaucratic power and render it distinct from the public, but equally this power could be diluted by constant circulation of files and over writing by multiple officials (Hull 2012, Gupta 2012). Colonial power was based on a extensive deployment of these paper based information systems for routine policing as well as managing migrants, epidemics, and cross border movements. By the 1930s this had expanded to welfare and ration cards targeted at urban population groups. This system was particularly widespread in the war economy of the 1940s. After independence, the postcolonial regime drew significantly from this system, though aligning it to republican democratic politics. In postcolonial modes of urban governance, paper based databases (electoral rolls, ration cards, land lists) produced by state functionaries intersected with political mobilizations at local and city levels. As typical postcolonial technologies of visibility, paper based information systems played a dual role, they allowed the regime to manage urban residents through systems of exclusion and inclusion, while for political groups entry into the database constituted an important vector of everyday life (Singha 2000, Sriraman 2013). Such political strategies could range from strategic entry into some databases (electoral rolls, ration cards) with fuzzy, land ownership patterns and paralegal access to informal systems of electricity and water. In this constellation, an entry into one information system could co-exist with tactical invisibility in another. Small traders, residents of squatter settlements, migrants, moved in this shifting information ecology. As we shall see later, it was this porosity that became perceived as a crippling problem for India’s globalization, underwriting the move to digital enumeration identification technologies. Yet, once technologies moved from classical enumeration to new technologies, control systems faced great strain, confusion and even fracture. The very technologies that were held out as intimating the future model of transparent urban governance have often rebounded, implicating both urban power and populations.

9Partha Chatterjee (2004) argues that in contrast to liberal citizenship, political democracy was based on a conceptual division between citizens and populations, where the latter were empirical categories of people who received administered welfare policies, and subject to governmental technologies. The resulting formation, ‘political society’ was implicated in a series of complex social arrangements and political mobilizations, similar to the ones in Delhi’s working class settlements. In parallel, Solomon Benjamin’s work (2005) on post-1977 East Delhi shows how an informal ‘neighbourhood as slum’, used local political networks, mobilized cash-based real estate finance and sourced official electricity and water infrastructures by bribing lower officials. In differing ways both Chatterjee and Benjamin address the urban boom from the late 1977 period, where ‘informality’ mixed with local political mobilization slowly transformed the urban debates. During the 1980s in Delhi and other Indian cities weaker municipal regimes and political fractures allowed for new urban migrant networks and the steady expansions of informal settlements. By the mid 1990s a different mood was perceptible. One of the main factors that politically weakened informal settlements was the rise of a middle class urban discourse in Indian cities from the late 1990s (Ghertner 2008).

10These middle class activists initiated a series of campaigns that sought to transform urban discourse after the economic reforms in the 1990s. The groups included select resident welfare associations, neo-liberal activists, ecological groups, transparency campaigners (Baviskar 2002, Mehra 2011). The court became a crucial battleground for this new ‘civic urbanism’ (Sundaram 2009). Periodic media events around urban crisis centered around court cases on environment, traffic and industry. Middle class activists hammered away with an active media presence and aggressive court petitions (Sundaram 2009, Bhuvania 2014). Helped by a sympathetic judiciary and media, civic urbanism mobilized the molecular event into a larger urban spectacle, dramatizing and unveiling a partially visible informal city. The 24-hour single-issue television loop now familiar to Indian TV viewers emerged in this period, with experts, and the scrolling feed of text headlines below the main screen.

Information, Transparency, Urban Infrastructure

Transparency has become one of the main slogans of urban and national politics for the Indian middle class, culminating in the anti-corruption campaigns in 2011-12 (Jenkins, 2014).

11Transparency had its first origins in French Enlightenment ideas on vision, light and optics. Light, it was believed, had the great power to penetrate dark spaces. The power of transparency lay, as Michel Foucault pointed out in his Eye of Power (1980) in the ability to see, without being seen. The new strategies of illumination were political technologies of visibility: statistics, hygiene, criminology, and the human sciences. In the first half of the 20^th century, transparency was submerged into the mainstream wisdom of the social sciences, rather than the older 19^th century optico-political register. By the post World War 2 period transparency arguments had dissolved into the larger body of modernization theory and development in the Third World.

12Transparency’s great revival was in the 1990s, in a decade of neoliberal ideologies and financial speculation. This was the discovery of new sources of opacity, along with legal rationalism. The new concern to make the invisible visible, moved into a diverse set of interventions: Hernando de Soto (2001) argued for formal property rights to mobilize what he called the dead (informal) capital of the South, corporate reform called for new ‘transparent’ models of financial disclosure, NGO activists called for legally visible and enumerated rights for migrants, microfinance, and new forms of documentation (Huchzermeyer 2009). A vast army of consultants and new forms of expertise emerged devoted to extract some form of visibility that could be measured for efficiency. This began an era of periodic institutional audits, review reports, and new standards set by consultants, ushering in what the anthropologist Marilyn Stathern (2000) calls the ‘tyranny of transparency,” the suppression of experimental and long term possibilities, in order to denote quantifiable standards.

14All this came in the in the background of expanding social welfare schemes from 2005, these included the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA or simply NREGA), that guaranteed a minimum of 100 days employment to the rural poor in most districts across the country. NREGA was widely seen as a factor in the return to power of the Congress regime (Jeelani 2010, Kumbar 2009). With the return of the Congress party coalition to power NREGA was planned to include urban areas, along with existing social programs like the National Literacy Mission, and the Rural Health Mission. In this environment, informationalization and IT enabled information infrastructures were seen as important tools for stabilizing welfare delivery.

18A significant initiative in Delhi has been the development of a massive GIS-based mapping exercise by the Survey of India, and the attempt to link welfare delivery to identification schemes using biometric technologies. In this section of the paper I examine these initiatives, drawing from current research.

The Map that sees

The direct takeover of Delhi by the British after the suppression of the uprising of 1857 initiated a series of exercises by the colonial power to represent the subjected city in terms familiar to the colonial rulers. European style cadastral maps now replaced the non-perspective Moghul map. Colonial infrastructure maps showing the water and sewage networks emerged by the early 20^th century. By 1912, along with Edward Lutyens and George Baker’s ambitious plan for the new capital, a significant survey of the city had been carried out by W.A.J Wilson, who was commissioned by the Government to prepare a series of maps that would document tenure, ownership and existing infrastructures. All structures, formal and informal were surveyed, along with courtyards, drains, balconies, stairways, waterways, rail and road networks, and land patterns. Religious and state buildings and their locations were duly noted, as well as ownership and tenancy details. Every enumerated dwelling was given a unique tax number as well as the name and occupation of the owner, father’s name and tenancy details if applicable (Hosagrahar 2005). The survey was motivated by not just the colonial project of effectively policing the city, but also producing a clear transition to a property market that could be represented in terms of formal European theories of exchange and rational models of enumeration.

19As an exercise, the Wilson survey amplified the rise of colonial technological power over precolonial ideas of land tenure and occupation that were divorced from capitalist exchange; it also fed into colonial information regimes like the census, health, and the police. For many years the Wilson survey maps helped not only in the design of the colonial capital, but was also used by the Fire Department, and electricity and transport companies.

21By the 1990s the planning regime was in disarray, the control model long bypassed by the massive expansion of informal and nonlegal settlements. Complex urban morphologies bore little resemblance to the Plan’s 1950s mapping exercises. With the rise of middle-class civic liberalism and court interventions the clamour for a new mapping exercise grew louder. Courts were also faced with a large body of cases involving jurisdictional disputes between infrastructure providers: electricity, water, and telecom. Departmental disputes within the city government (fire, police, sanitation) over jurisdiction and territory were widespread as technologies of mediation that were established by urban political elites in the 1960s were largely in disarray by the 1990s. By 2006 the Supreme Court had ordered widespread sealing of shops deemed illegal under the old Masterplan, and the city went through a series of general strikes and a one year parliament moratorium on court sealing (Mehra 2011).

The Aadhaar Biomentric Design and the New Urban turn

Among the early supporters of civic transparency initiatives in the 1990s was the entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of the Bangalore-based software giant Infosys. An alumnus of Bombay’s Indian Institute of Technology, Nilekani became one of India’s most successful IT industrialists when he set up Infosys with his colleague MR Narayanamurthy. Infosys rode the IT boom of the 1990s by establishing supply networks with US companies and continuing to expand after 2001. From 2003 Nilekani positioned himself in the centre of India’s intellectual discourse on transparency and economic transformation. In 2008, Nilekani published Imagining India : the Idea of a Renewed Nation. The book opened to ecstatic reviews in the Indian and international press; Widely researched by a large team that worked for him, Imagining India argued for Nilekani’s typical mix of civic liberal ideas, where individual freedom in markets free of interference would prosper with social infrastructure built by the state. Citizenship in the new order was to be based on a transparency regime that guaranteed rights through unhindered access to universal identification. India’s government departments are isolated technologically, argued Nilekani, choked with paperwork, and lack a common technological grid. Service delivery is crippled and inefficiency abounds (350: 2009).

27An ID system concluded Nilekani, would have “revolutionary” implications for India.

“No one else can claim a benefit that is rightfully yours, and no one else can deny their economic status” (Ibid: 354).

28In the link of individual freedom and rational information systems and service delivery to the poor Imagining India articulated an emerging elite consensus on developing new techniques of government in the years after 2005 This consensus saw the argument for the old ‘social’ based on political incorporation into welfare increasingly difficult to sustain following the neo-liberal era. The focus on the formal economy after the reforms of the 1990s, magnified the space of the ‘informal’ as a ‘not yet’ – a space where techniques of escape by errant populations were seen not just as sources of waste but also potential criminality and terrorism. Nilekani’s ‘countability’ along with new forms of visibility through digital surfaces, has now come to occupy prime place in the new discourses on modernization in contemporary India.

29In June 2009, the Indian Prime Minister invited Nandan Nilekani to join the newly created Unique Identification Authority of India as a head with a cabinet rank. The Authority would set about creating a common Unique Identifying Number (UID) for all residents. Though a national project, the UID has great relevance for urban infrastructure as most identification projects compare themselves to the UID in cities.

30The UID initiative came in the background of existing historical practices of identification in 20^th century India. The colonial regime had set up an information infrastructure for food rationing in the late 1930s, which made complex classifications based on the war economy and the need to manage food shortages in India. (Sriraman, 2013) Ration cards were introduced to different categories of the urban population, including able workers, government servants, and food distribution managed through authorized shops.

33Aadhaar has two components that directly impact urban life, along with the rest of India. The dynamic authentication model, where the number verifies identity for both state and private services, is premised on multiplication, and an expansion of the market for financial and other products. Digital verification assumes that traditional intermediaries of the existing information economy (politicians, local officials) will be bypassed in place of a permanent visible bond of the population with governmental power. Second, the assumption is as welfare payments are routed directly to beneficiaries’ formal bank accounts in a ‘targeted’ approach, the infusion of cash into the urban poor will expand the range of financial services and private players available, and weed out the corrupt (Chaganti 2013 : 26-43). This model of private information harvesting has pushed Aadhaar into conflict with other state bodies like the National Population Register that gather information based on the Citizenship Act, as well as social activists who have questioned the mandatory link to welfare disbursals (Bhatti et al. 2012, Rajadhyaksha 2013).

Conclusion: the aporias of the informational turn

At a more ambitious level, the informational turn sought to update and modernize the old relationship between urban populations, land and social power. Biometric Identification was held out as the main filter to enter urban citizenship, rearranging the older model of the population mediated by city politics and local networks. GIS mapping seeks to open up large tracts of urban land, including the informal zones to property titling, private infrastructure and surveillance, all of which are massive shifts from the planning designs of the 1960s. As technological infrastructures managed by private companies and state technocrats play an increasing role, traditional political mobilization in the city faces a great challenge. Older urban politics had produced itself as a sole gateway to paper information regimes in the city (ration cards, land mutation, election IDs); today this arrangement faces a significant challenge.