CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 44E-Government and Public ServicesCorruption and Economic DevelopmentPublic Administration in Developing Nations

Dealing with the digital panopticon: the use and subversion of ICT in an Indian bureaucracy

Veeraraghavan, Rajesh·2013·Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development: Full Papers - Volume 1
DOI 10.1145/2516604.2516631
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

To what extent can information technology be used to eliminate government corruption? In this paper, I examine an ambitious experiment by a South Indian state in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) within a bureaucracy to reduce corruption. In this initiative, the senior bureaucrats built a digital network to remotely control the implementation of a public rural employment scheme. Focusing on the technology-based implementation for this paper, I show that centralization of implementation that the technology enabled could significantly overcome the endemic corruption that tends to happen in the local "last mile" of such schemes. I also find how technology designed for control can be subverted at the local level. My work suggests that the future of such government programs lies in incrementally resolving the conflicting forces and interests involved and that the move towards technical is as much a political project.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/2516604.2516631

Cites

26 of 26 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Earlier Indian disasters, such as the 1984 Union Carbide leak, show how faulty design and poor quality reflect double standards for the third world.

    “Past disasters in India, like the fatal Union Carbide gas leak in 1984-one of the world's worst industrial accidents-point to faulty design and low quality, double standards for the 'third world' [206].”

    From Re-imagining Algorithmic Fairness in India and Beyond (2021) · cites this paper as [206]

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Veeraraghavan, R.
Affiliations
University of California, Berkeley (US)
Corresponding author
Veeraraghavan, Rajesh
ORCID
Veeraraghavan, Rajesh
Venue
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development: Full Papers - Volume 1
Publisher
ACM
Published
2013-12-07
Pages
248-255
DOI
10.1145/2516604.2516631
OpenAlex
W1970325053
Cited by
44
References
26
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 19 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 2
FWCI
12.34
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Background (vor)
Locations
International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › E-Government and Public Services
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Corruption and Economic Development
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Public Administration in Developing Nations
Keywords
political corruption, information and communication technologies, digital panopticon, bureaucracy, remote monitoring

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review