Citizen labor

Abstract

In the last two decades, India's system of agricultural land management has been transitioning from paper to digital records. In effecting this shift, engineers and bureaucrats in the city of Bangalore, India's “Silicon Valley,” have tacitly and invisibly shifted the responsibility for maintaining data from the state to individuals. Moreover, the new digital databases of land records have fragmented offices and dispersed data across new sites and actors. Under these transformed conditions, people can access services only through what I call citizen labor. That is, when digitization is applied to land and property—which are quintessential sites for the making and unmaking of citizenship—people are interpellated into laboring on their own data. This shows that the digitization of government extracts a form of labor, one whose benefits accrue to groups and organizations beyond the laboring individual. As a result, people have an increasingly degraded experience of substantive citizenship.