Digital Duress: Affective Resistance of Mandated ICT Use in India’s Public Distribution System

This study theorizes emotion as a form of resistance in government-mandated technology use. Drawing on 176 open-ended survey responses from frontline public workers in India’s Public Distribution System (PDS), we conduct a grounded theory-informed, lexicon-assisted narrative analysis. We identify four affective orientations, anxious, resigned, silent, and workaround, each representing a distinct emotional strategy for navigating digital systems under conditions of infrastructural fragility and institutional compulsion. Rather than treating affect as noise or a post hoc response, we position it as central to the lived experience and subtle forms of resistance to digitization. Our findings extend information systems research by integrating technostress, learned helplessness, and affective publics into a typology of emotional resistance. This work contributes to digital government literature by highlighting the limits of compliance-based evaluation and advocating for emotionally responsive design in high-stakes, low-choice environments.