Decrypting E-Governance: Narratives, Power play and Participation in the Gyandoot Intranet

The mapping of the social and political constraints that marginalized communities and individuals encounter in their interface with e-governance projects, perhaps, has implications for the optimistic political vision of new media technologies as a decolonizing force facilitating development of “cyborg skills†required for their survival under techno-human conditions theorized in the cyber-feminist approaches to new technologies. Identifying the structural factors that envelop human technology interaction in the rural setting in South Asia is thus an inevitable step in understanding social innovations and its impacts either initiated by the State or by civil society or by State-civil society partnerships. This paper is an attempt in that direction. The central themes addressed in this paper relate to the critique of the notion of egovernance as an essentially administrative innovation facilitated by ICTs and recognition of e-governance as social process which involves not only attitudinal change and transformation of traditional forms of governmentality but also as a contested arena of social forces shaping the trajectory of the evolution of this technocratic innovation.