Data and the Indian state

Why has the digital economy in India been steadily expanding for the past decade? How did data become so pervasive and powerful? What is the impact of emerging infrastructures on identities and relationships, financial transactions, ways of remembering? When did governance come to be synonymous with surveillance? Where does one situate the ethical ambiguities around data mining as a mode of knowledge production? These urgent questions animate the pages of Sandeep Mertia’s edited volume Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India.

This book would appeal to readers interested in database design, online archives, digital payments and artificial intelligence. In