1 - Introduction

Summary

Abstract In this chapter, I question the common assumptions and dominant discussions on poor children's digital lives. Popular narratives on poor children in global South countries emphasise that the proliferation of digital technologies can tackle poverty, discrimination, and other social inequities. These narratives embed neoliberal logic and argue that children are either victims of digital technologies and need protection or are self-motivated to use these technologies for empowerment and development purposes. Poor children's engagements with digital technologies exceed binary categories of analysis such as resistance–oppression and agency–subjection. Contrary to these dominant explanations, the chapter makes a case that poor children in India are globally oriented, locally grounded, exploitative and exploited, ambitious and leisure-driven, creative and innovative.

Keywords: jugaad, poverty of resources, digital leisure, resilience, global South, India

More than eight million children live in low-income neighbourhoods in India, with a monthly family income of ten dollars. Children in these urban sprawls have acquired access to affordable digital technologies, including smartphones, laptops, personal computers, and data packages. They labour long hours every day to earn daily wages—as domestic workers, waitpersons, delivery persons, garbage collectors, and street hawkers. Even still, they spend a large portion of their limited time and meagre income on their smartphones, scrolling through social media, chatting with their friends, gossiping about relatives, surveilling their neighbours, and cultivating connections (Arora, 2019; Rangaswamy & Nair, 2010).

Unbeknownst to the quotidian digital experiences of poor children and people, popular narratives explore the possibility of tackling poverty, discrimination, and other social inequities through digital technologies. Developmental agencies, government policies, not-for-profit organisations, and corporate offers and services in low-income settlements in India embed the assumption that digital access is a great leveller. It is not a stretch to argue that different organisations working in low-income settlements in India adopt the conservative definition of development promoted by research in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). For a long time, research on the role of ICTs in resource-constrained contexts of the global South has continued to use a socio-economic framework for the analysis of development goals (Burrell and Anderson, 2009) within which the functions, serviceability, and mobilisation of ICTs are limited to a traditional, scientific and West-focused understanding of development and progress. Scholarship, state programmes and policies, and corporate offerings promoting a conservative and neoliberal understanding of ICT for development (ICT4D) are thus designed to impact entire communities/ populations through ICT interventions.