On a short family holiday just before I started at Connected by Data, the one bit of holiday reading I managed to finish (from the ever-optimistic stack of 5 books I carted around) was Rajesh Veeraraghavan’s new book ‘Patching development: Information Politics and Social Change in India’.
The book is the product of years of in-depth study and ethnographic field-work looking at the implementation of social audits within the National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREGA) scheme in Andhra Pradesh, India. I’d got hold of a copy of it not only because I’ve heard snippets of the story of the field work from Rajesh when we’ve talked over the last few years, but also it just so happens I spent time looking at the creation of NREGA in an undergraduate studies module on the politics of India in 2005, so it’s a topic I’ve loosely followed over the years.
However, what I hadn’t expected was to find just how useful the story of regulating the ‘last mile’ delivery of a policy offering rural families 100 days of manual labour a year might be to the work thinking about the design of participatory data governance systems that I would be focussed on in my new job.