Techno-optimism and I.T. Talk
19
attracting venture capital because of the low margin of profit, the overall publicity surrounding
the launch of the simputer presents its benefits not in terms of efficiency or centrality, but sheer
inevitability. Take the following line from the home page,
www.simputer.org
: “It has a special
role in the third world because it ensures that illiteracy is no longer a barrier to using
computers…. A local community such as the village panchayat, the village school, a kiosk, a
village postman, or even a shopkeeper should be able to loan the device to individuals for some
length of time and then pass it on to others in the community. The Simputer, through its Smart
Card feature allows for personal information management at the individual level for an unlimited
number of users.” This sort of “push” addresses what can be construed as being the prime
obstacles to the inevitability and ubiquity of computers—issues of usability and accessibility.
The overall context of liberalization and the three themes of efficiency, centrality and
inevitability in NGO I.T. Talk serve as a discursive institutional framework whereby one can
examine the interpretation of information technology at one particular NGO. The study of such
micro-level contexts assumes theoretical and practical significance: theoretical in the sense that
issues of power and control are always eventually worked out at a micro-level, and practical
inasmuch as it can provide us with insight into just how people who work in NGOs actually
interpret and use information technology.
Studying an NGO
The NGO that I examine in this essay, and which I refer to by the pseudonym ‘Different
Visions’ (or DV), is based in a major city in India, and broadly speaking, deals with issues of
sustainable development. In its mission statement, the organization describes itself as a non-
profit agency “dedicated to devising and promoting better approaches for the development of
Convention