‘Digitalisation In India—The Class Agenda’, edited by the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE), is a formidable and necessary intervention in the celebratory discourse surrounding India's digital transformation. This compilation brings together incisive analyses from some of the most astute minds in political economy to expose the often-invisible underbelly of the digital revolution. The book rigorously explores a fundamental question: who truly benefits from the advent of the digital economy? In doing so, it systematically dismantles the misconceptions, structural inequalities, and dominant ideologies that underpin mainstream narratives.
Far from being a mere technological upgrade, the book argues that digitalisation is a potent instrument for consolidating corporate power and exacerbating existing class divisions. It provides a powerful critique of "digi-mania" by applying a coherent class-analytic approach to various facets of this economic shift, compelling readers to look beyond the glossy surface of innovation.
The collection begins with Arun Kumar, who dissects government initiatives like demonetisation, the Goods and Services Tax (GST), and the COVID-19 lockdown, demonstrating how they served as catalysts for enforced digitalisation. His analysis reveals how this process has intensified the grip of international finance capital on the Indian economy, disproportionately empowering the organised corporate sector—largely controlled by multinational corporations—at the expense of the unorganised sector.
Anurag Mehra then throws light on the mechanisms by which digitalisation engineers inequality. He focuses on the job market, exploring how automation and robotisation are destroying traditional employment. Mehra vividly describes the coerced transition to gig work, where workers face an utter asymmetry of information and are controlled by opaque algorithms, resulting in widespread precarity and the large-scale exclusion of rightful claimants from social security and fair working conditions.
The book’s critique extends into the realms of social welfare. Indira Chakraborti investigates the financialisation and digitalisation of healthcare, tracing how international agencies like the Gates Foundation, the World Bank, and the WHO have shaped agendas such as the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana. She critically examines the National Digital Health Mission, arguing that the drive to create centralised, digital personal health data serves not public health, but the pursuit of private profit for the corporate sector.
A similar fate for public education is explored by Rahul Varman and Munali Chakraborti. They argue that the World Bank's policy prescriptions have long undermined the public education system, and digitalisation has only accentuated the monopoly of corporate ed-tech platforms like Byju’s and private philanthropists like Bill Gates. The shift to online education, they contend, has converted learning into a commodity, rendering redundant the organic, irreplaceable interaction between teacher and student and within the broader community of learners.
The physical transformation of India's cities is scrutinised by Husain Indorewala, who unpacks the actual role of the Smart City Mission. His findings are stark: the mission allocates a mere one-fifth of its resources to basic services, channeling a massive 80 percent towards developing elite enclaves. This facilitates the transfer of control over policy formulation to international firms, the appropriation of public assets, and the large-scale privatisation of public services.
The Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE) itself contributes two of the most crucial, overarching analyses. First, it examines India's overall economic performance since 2014, a period of peak digitalisation, revealing a landscape of depressed consumption, repressed investment, and a workforce increasingly pushed into low-productivity, low-income sectors. The digital sector, RUPE argues, remains an enclave, failing to integrate with the rest of the economy.
Second, RUPE powerfully reframes the entire subject through the lens of imperialist domination. It exposes India's deep dependence on imported hardware, the dominance of digital markets by firms from imperialist countries, and the capture of data as a critical raw material. This section elucidates how foreign investment is used to capture economic territory, and how political influence can be wielded to eliminate rivals, illustrating the stark realities of power in the digital age.
Further, RUPE’s analysis unearths the precarious financial state of the Indian masses, highlighting their reliance on informal debt, exorbitant interest rates, and profound vulnerability to economic shocks. The book also explores the fundamental dichotomy between India's vast small peasantry—driven by subsistence needs and clinging to unremunerative land—and the corporate sector, driven by an insatiable profit motive. The state's digitalisation drive, by providing corporations with a wealth of individualised data, directly strengthens corporate power over the peasantry, turning them into mere profit-maximising units.
‘Digitalisation In India—The Class Agenda’ concludes that this state-led drive is not an inexorable force of nature. It can be checked, RUPE argues, through the organised resistance of the small peasantry and the working class, and by the inherent limitations of the Indian market itself.
In sum, this book is an arduous and indispensable effort to understand the political economy of India's digital transition. It serves as a vital antidote to techno-utopian hype, providing a coherent framework to challenge the deepening inequalities and the tightening grip of corporate power in the 21st century. It is a testament to the enduring power of class analysis in an age of ones and zeros.
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*Freelance journalist
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