By December 2020, at the end of a brutal and debilitating year defined by the pandemic, the digital payments industry in India was cheering. After suffering a huge hit in March because of the closure of travel, digital payment apps were held out as the transactional format of the future.[1] It was a remarkable claim given the devastation of 2020, and the shrinking of the Indian economy.

We need to understand the peculiar contexts of India’s COVID-19 emergency. On March 24 of last year, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi announced a stringent nationwide lockdown during a TV address at 8pm. The lockdown began at midnight. This gave people precisely four hours to get supplies and prepare for the coming uncertain weeks. In fact, three quarters of the way through the prime minister’s TV address, I rushed to my local neighbourhood market and found it crowded with other residents hoping to stock up. Notably, the cash machines saw long lines, and by the time my turn came, they were emptied out. The next day, hundreds of thousands of working-class migrants began returning to their villages from India’s cities, many on foot, some on trucks, almost universally abandoned by the regime after the announcement of the COVID-19 lockdown. Approximately 25-30 million migrants went back to their home states, the largest movement of human beings in recent times.

Two decades ago, in their classic text, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star argued that infrastructure becomes visible only during its breakdown.[2] The COVID-19 crisis laid bare the distinctive patchwork of urban informational infrastructures that managed city populations: a hybrid mix of paper, digital IDs, welfare systems tied to home states. Tarangini Sriraman and Nitya V have detailed the multiple, over-informationalised ‘proof regime’ that migrants faced as they desperately tried to get home. Migrants came into contact with local police, sympathetic networks of NGOs and civic groups. All these encounters generated informational demands, as part of the proof regime. The ‘proof’ could be documentary artefacts of identity: online relief forms, SMSs, Whatsapp messages, bus and railway tickets, invoices, lists, or ID documents. Or it could be performative gestures and truth claims showing the migrant worker in real living time: the phone camera capturing the travelling worker on the bus or the train, the worker who has reached home, the shelter-based worker on the cusp of travelling.[3] Scholars have spoken of the combination of the bio-medical and informational infrastructures that have defined the year of COVID-19. In Indian cities the migrant crisis saw an acceleration of existing models of information gathering – from police records on migrant control and crowd management to NGOs burdened with audit culture as they struggled to combine support for migrants with filing reports in standardised templates and keeping copies of receipts.

The connection of documentation with displacement is a constant in theme in India’s urban history. More than a decade ago, the working-class settlement of Nangla Machi in Dehli was demolished. A young writer from Nangla called Babli Rai summed up the anxieties in the area when residents began to frantically look for state documentation that could prove that they could fulfil the city government’s requirements. In a powerful essay titled ‘What’s in This Word “Evidence”?’ Babli wrote:

So I sat down, with all the slips and papers and documents spread out around me, my eyes fixed on them, on the look­ out for the official language of evidence. Every document feels like the yolk of an egg held in one's palm, ready to spill. Every paper must be touched softly, its folds smoothened gently, lest the paper tear and the document become meaningless. And when you can't find a document, the turbulence that causes is such that you become like a diver, diving into the deep oceans, in search for your lost treasure[4].

The proof regimes described by Sriraman and Nitya are similar to the tribulations faced by Nangla residents, but there have been distinctive shifts in the intervening period. A massive governmental informational infrastructure rolled out over the last decade has framed a biopolitical model of citizenship. Here the statistical construction of a population (as laid out by Foucault) has been supplanted by the participatory condition of citizenship. In an algorithmic governmentality in the era of mobile phones, real-time participation by populations provides them with recognition as subjects. In contrast to contingent political speech, app-based and hardware interactions by populations seeking to access public services define the new participatory condition.[5] The contrast with earlier paper-based governmental information systems could not be greater. Remarkably, British colonial power was based on the proliferation of writing genres – a product of the pathologies of the colonisers. As the historian Miles Ogborn has shown, periodic verification and multiple authentication systems defined early colonial rule.[6]

Postcolonial bureaucracies have followed this, leading to a multiplication of authentication systems of stamps, counter-signature, and paper genres. Documentary regimes sought to produce informational power as distinct from the public, but equally this power could be diluted by constant circulation and over-writing by multiple officials. For the early decades of postcolonial urban governance, paper-based information systems like electoral rolls, ration cards and land lists overlapped with political assertions in the city. Migrants to the city periodically petitioned local politicians for entry into welfare systems and legalising squatter settlements. Paper-based information systems were defined by a productive ambiguity that served both regime and enumerated. If the regime was able to play with hierarchies of entry into legal data bases, urban politics was organised around mobilising for entry. These political strategies could range from strategic entry into some city databases (electoral rolls, ration cards) to informal arrangements for water and electricity. In retrospect, paper systems were generative of multiple writing strategies, and permeable boundaries. Subaltern populations could work information systems, entering some and leaving others. The move to digital models of enumeration has generated a cluster of models: biometric identification cards, direct cash transfers, OTP-based verification – all efforts to stabilise a vast informal populace. In line with neoliberal audit models that distrusted porosity, what emerged was the primacy of participation in governmental digital infrastructures. Participation is seen as enabling algorithmic governmental machines, where bodies are verified periodically. In effect older welfare systems have been substantially disturbed, with disastrous consequences for millions – as was visible during the pandemic. Conceived as an always-on model of optimisation for subject populations, public information infrastructures are crucial drivers of platform cultures in the Global South, driving mobile phone ownership, financial technology companies, and the many consumer apps. In the event, series of patchwork hybrids and vernacular quasi-objects have emerged.[7] Local officials routinely switch between familiar paper systems and real-time interfaces with survey templates; traditional information intermediaries compete with software systems. Even in the more global platform apps like Uber, drivers may rely on parallel paper systems of accounting to tabulate their remunerations from the company.[8]