Maintenance Work for the Global Information Highway: Village Data Processing Centers in India

• In Event: Techno-Jobs and Capital III: Transnationalism, Race, Gender, and Expertise of Techno-Labor

Abstract

Data flows in the global economy are not without maintenance stops. At times, information needs to be processed, reconditioned, and transformed. This presentation focuses on sites of such data processing in unlikely places – the wheat and sugar cane fields of rural India. Here we find newly installed ICT outsourcing centers, part of what are called social enterprises, as a solution to unemployment as well as a means of accessing inexpensive labor. These centers receive data from Europe and the US (on package tracking, sales invoices, human resources, etc.), and then transform, input, and transmit it back. While this growing industry has been concentrated in the techno-hubs of India (Gurgaon, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, etc.), it is now moving into village areas of Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Karnataka, where I have done my fieldwork. In these locations, the work is broken down into more simple tasks, but still directly connected to global information systems, and done in real time.

One aim of this project, then, is to capture the complexity of what Miraftab (2016) calls the global heartland. Rather than being cut off from capital and information flows common to cities, rural areas are also becoming sites for the transnational: to receive global immigrant labor for local industries (as in her case), or in the reverse, to serve as sites of local labor for global industries (as in my case). These outsourcing centers represent meeting points – of old and new technologies, of rural and urban spheres, of consumption and information industries, of technical and non-technical labor. It is “unskilled,” but still involves interfacing with computer software, as well as reading and typing in languages they do not speak themselves. It is routine work, but involves the high pressure labor of linguistic translation, data conversion, and inputting information in real time, often just minutes.

Another aim is uncovering the invisible labor (Poster, Crain, and Cherry 2016) of information services. Like data janitors, social media content moderators, and call center workers (Downey 2001; Irani 2015; Poster 2011), these workers do the hidden, unglamorous, and routine labor of cleaning up and caring for data. This is a form of maintenance work (Russell and Vinsel 2016), opposite to the more prestigious and well-rewarded work of innovation (often in the global north). Furthermore, this case also represents an illustration of postcolonial computing, as a transnational system of the digital (Philip, Irani, and Dourish 2010). The seemless, smooth-running of information systems in the global north is at times dependent upon connection points located in the global south, and their highly marginalized, rural workforces.

Author

• Winifred Poster, Washington University, St. Louis