Reengineering India

The march towards a ‘new India’ began with its entry onto the global stage as a rising economic power, impelled by liberalization policies and the forces of globalization. The success of India’s information technology (IT) industry symbolizes these larger developments, yet we lack a critical understanding of the wider social and cultural reverberations of this phenomenon. Reengineering India explores India’s post-liberalization transformation through the lens of the software industry. This book views the IT industry as a key site where new identities, aspirations and social imaginaries are being created and circulated. It examines the origins and organization of software capital, the production of the Indian IT workforce, the introduction of new forms of work and management and the connections between software and the ‘new’ middle class. The author argues that the software industry has been central to India’s post-liberalization refashioning, yet it remains deeply embedded in older structures of inequality and modes of accumulation. An anthropological account of the relationship between work, class, capital and culture in India’s new economy, this book is essential reading for thinking about the future of the post-IT revolution nation.