The Meantime of Development: Aspirational Technology and Future Making in India’s Welfare Bureaucracy

This text develops the notion of meantime of development to excavate a temporal orientation that underscores techno-optimist engagement with the future. The discussion bounces off Jharkhand’s experience with the new smart version of India’s Public Distribution System (PDS), as an instance of using aspirational technology to fix long-standing social ills. The system deploys biometric IDs (Aadhaar) for policing distribution and preventing fraud and leakage at the end point of the commodity chain, the fair price shop, where customers receive subsidised grain. Aadhaar was intended to improve fairness and protect the poor from corruption, yet from the beginning the new infrastructure was plagued with problems and required further tweaking to become somewhat functional. As all stakeholders become embroiled in complicated negotiations, the landscape of problems has shifted, producing new exclusions and novel forms of fraud. In techno-optimist readings, such complexity becomes simplified and broken down into failures to be learned from and there is the naive expectation that the next iteration of the reform will fix these problems. Because aspirational technology proves to be particularly malleable and flexible, the iterative remaking of workflows constitutes more than a technical fix; rather, it sustains an optimistic view of the future.