Elites invoking the commons: The techno-utopias of the Indian national knowledge portals

Access to information is widely envisioned as a human right and requirement of governance. But who dictates the terms and infrastructures of access and what political histories are embedded in them? Amidst a burgeoning authoritarianism in Indian politics and governmental exceptions preserved for the high-tech sector, I analyze the policy origins and establishment of a large-scale digital commons experiment, the national knowledge portals of India, and its relations to the state, capital, and commonality. Claiming to promote national prosperity based on the commoning of a uniquely compound resource, online information that referred to material resources offline, the portals were designed by multiple cohorts of technocratic elites and resulted in exclusive trajectories of access. Despite such practical disappointments of an “actually existing commons,” commoning nonetheless may perform a higher political function by legitimating continued political access for tech-sector actors in state planning across regimes.