Hacking Health Issues in the Global South: An Ethnography of Medical Device Innovation in Contemporary India

• In Event: Emergent Technologies in Biomedicine and Healthcare: Boundaries, Tensions, and Possibilities - I

Abstract

Over the past decade, increasing numbers of doctors, engineers and product designers are joining together to form startups to invent medical devices. I study this current phenomenon of novel medical device creation in contemporary South Asia, focusing on the robust “medtech” entrepreneurial ecosystem in Bangalore, the “Silicon Valley” of India. As elite professionals trained in medicine and engineering leave traditional career paths and establish themselves as entrepreneurs and inventors, I question the discourses and practices through which they render their emergent biomedical technologies innovative or not, specifically when certain devices are categorized as the products of indigenous, “jugaad innovation” and/or as globally marketable health interventions. Based on over a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Bangalore’s medtech startups, incubators and design firms—observing and participating in the creation of several medical devices firsthand—this paper will demonstrate when and how new forms of Indian biocapital is rendered disruptive and valuable, in two ways. First, in examining how the production of medical devices—as opposed to drugs—shifts our attention from the generic manufacturing and standardized commodity exchange that has marked most scholarship on South Asian biocapital into the uncharted territories of technological hacking and entrepreneurialism. And second, in understanding how certain gendered and classed identities of the bodies are required for making and testing medical devices in progress. By bringing these two vectors of medtech production together, I will argue how novel, emergent forms of biocapital rooted in the Global South are contributing to changing global landscapes of disruptive biomedical innovation.

Author

• Anisha Chadha