The PC in an Indian urban slum: enterprise and entrepreneurship in ICT4D 2.0

This paper examines the embedding of information and communication technology (ICT) tools in everyday practices among underserved populations in urban India. Using ethnographic investigations of PC-aided micro- and small enterprises (MSEs) in a low-income slum neighborhood in Mumbai, it pursued three broad research goals: first, to etch out organic ICT immersions in underserved technology environments; second, to articulate a new and evolving socio-technical system in an urban slum ecology; third, to seek a fit between goals of ICT for development and impacts of PC-aided enterprise on ICT access and adoption. Based on the ICT4D 2.0 approach interrogating the technology-for-development discourse, this paper substantiates the need for a “new view of the world's poor: one that views the poor not as passive consumers but agile agents and innovative producers of ICT products and services.”     

Rahul Mehrotra Associates

Rahul Mehrotra maintains a diverse and active role as an architect, urban activist, writer and teacher. His book Bombay: The Cities Within (1995), with Sharada Dwivedi, is a major enquiry into the history and sociology of India's vivacious and contentious urbanism. He finds his city of practice - Mumbai - a mine for quarrying architectural ideations and languages. Unlike most regions in India that may have to adhere to a conformist cultural agenda, Mumbai offers a conceptual freedom in traversing the traditional and contemporary as the city has its particular plurality in the intertwining epochs, attitudes and ‘coming together and moving apart of the past and present’. Multiplicity is thus axiomatic in Mehrotra's interpretation of the city, although this is transferred in his architecture as a dialogical juxtaposition of public and private, exteriority and interiority, natural and industrial materials, and the traditional and contemporary. Interiority, arising both from reasons of climate and urban conditions, is an abiding theme in Mehrotra's work and is articulated through reified courtyards and walls that also retain an intimate conversation with the larger landscape. From residences to large complexes, he uses these elements with great craft and finesse to create dramatic spaces with changing palettes of materials, colours and phenomenally modulated differences between the exterior and interior.‘In our projects, the approach has been to abstract and interpret spatial arrangements as well as building vocabulary,’ he says. ‘The idea is to combine materials, to juxtapose conventional craftsmanship with industrial materials and traditional spatial arrangements with contemporary space organisation. In short, to give expression to the multiple worlds, pluralism and dualities that so vividly characterise the Asian landscape.’ Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

In Depth: Inscribing the Indian Landscape

When India was colonised by the British in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was systematically surveyed and delineated in map form for administrative and political purposes. Here, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha urge a new, ‘deeper’ reading of the landscape that fully acknowledges the multiple uses and potential initiations of public spaces. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.