Data Worlds and Public Health: Model-Building in the Global South

• In Event: Global Medicine from the South? Emerging Markets and Indian Ocean Medical Worlds - I

Abstract

This paper explores big data infrastructures that are facilitating new models of public health and welfare in the global South. In particular, it examines the establishment of India’s National Health Protection Mission, the world’s largest government-funded health scheme, and how it is using big data collected under the auspices of Aadhar, the world’s largest biometric system. The new health scheme, in its intertwining with the massive data infrastructure of Aadhar, incorporates strands of political, economic and epistemological reasonings that reconstitute traditional understandings of public and private. Moreover, this welfare scheme is being built as a model that can be carried to other countries in the global South. Both architects within the Indian government and external observers have engaged in a discourse of how the intertwining of public health and big data in India may serve as a template that can be replicated and scaled up in other countries such as South Africa and Kenya. The paper investigates the practices and ideologies that animate technopolitical model-building in India, which simultaneously reconstitute public-private binaries in a national context, and centre-periphery trajectories in a global domain.

Author

• Manjari Mahajan, New School University