Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from C ...

Several Indian states have implemented ambitious e-literacy and e-governance initiatives. National and state government projects are in the process of bringing the benefits of information technology and the Internet to rural Indian communities.

Access to information technology and the Internet, however, is the privilege of an elite in liberalized India. Keniston points out that for “Indians who speak no (or little) English, the barriers to the Information Age are almost insuperable,” since fluency in English is a requirement for the use of operating systems, software, and Web sites.¹⁹ The reach of the Internet is far more modest than its instrumental value in driving economic reforms. By February 2005, the total number of phone subscribers in India had increased to 97.03 million.²⁰ Yet, as of December 2005, India had only 5.56 million Internet subscribers.²¹ And the number of Internet users in India as of 2006 was just 40 million—a fraction of its population of more than 1 billion.²² Internet usage, as Wolcott and Goodman suggest, is dominated by an “urban core” and the predominant users of the Indian Internet are the educated middle classes.²³ It is worth noting here that the Indian “middle classes” are actually socioeconomic elites and can broadly be defined as the top 25 percent income-earning segments of Indian society.²⁴ Almost 90 percent of all Web sites visited by Indians are in the English language.²⁵

The chief beneficiaries of the developments in technology in liberalized India are largely English-speaking middle-class and upper-class urban groups. As will be described shortly, to a significant extent, these are the same demographic segments that have historically benefited from the technology policies of the post-1947 independent Indian state, although there have been some important changes in the internal composition of these elites. Keniston speaks of a new elite group in India comprised of workers in high-tech professions. The “digerati,” as Keniston calls them, are “the beneficiaries of the enormously successful information technology (IT) industry and the other knowledge-based sectors of the economy, such as biotechnology and pharmacology.”²⁶ Affluent, cosmopolitan, and globally mobile, the status of the digerati derives from the digerati’s technological education and expertise and not from caste, wealth, or social privileges.