Digitisation of rural economy

What has been digitised

After the 2010s, Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar authentication, Direct Benefit Transfer, UPI payments, e-NAM and state e-procurement, land-record computerisation, Kisan credit on core banking, and e-Shram or MGNREGA electronic muster rolls became ordinary rural infrastructure. Common Service Centres and banking correspondents sit in the same space as the kirana shop. NITI and ministry dashboards treat this as financial inclusion.

For anthropology the village is still a social system. M. N. Srinivas’s dominant caste and F. G. Bailey’s faction now operate through who owns the smartphone, the SIM in a woman’s name, and the password for the PDS or pension app. McKim Marriott’s little tradition meets a national payment grid.

Effects on livelihood and power

Cashless procurement and DBT can cut leakage that André Béteille and later political economists associated with local brokers. A tribal tendu or lac seller who is paid into an account is less easily short-changed at the weekly hat, if she can read the SMS. Contract farming and warehouse receipts, however, still favour literate, landed households. L. P. Vidyarthi’s nature–man–spirit complex is strained when forest produce is invoiced on a portal that the Gram Sabha does not control.

• Digitisation also creates new intermediaries: the Common Service Centre operator, the cyber-cafe, the relative who “helps” with OTP. Women and older Adivasis often hand the phone to a male kin. Irawati Karve’s kinship map still predicts who holds the device.

Limits

Connectivity, biometric failure (especially among elderly and manual workers), and English or Hindi interfaces exclude many Scheduled Tribe hamlets. Land records that are wrong on paper become wrong at speed once they are online. A purely digital rural economy without PESA Gram Sabha oversight and without FRA titles can freeze dispossession rather than reverse it.