E-governance in India: Sociological perspective

e-Governance, especially in developing countries, is looked upon as a means to change the very concept of governance resulting in empowerment of the citizens and increased transparency in public sphere. The experience of production, diffusion and use of ICTs in India has been intriguing and complex, it is also home to one of the largest set of civil society experiments using ICTs to empower the marginalized. e-Governance in India, with its grand scale of investment, ambitious goals and pervasiveness, is one of the biggest spectacles of technological intervention in everyday life of people, especially in the rural areas. The paper aims to build a theoretically informed case for sociological enquiry into e-governance by problematizing the relationships between technology, development and governance – from the grand global narratives to the local contextual minutiae. The paper argues that there are structural constraints that confront initiatives in that direction there by reinforcing or aggravating inequities scripted by the current global capitalist dynamic.