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Paper short abstract:

Edgar Codd's invention of a relational method of storing data at IBM led to a humungous rise in the sale of databases. Studying the transaction of databases between the US and India's planning elite, this paper attempts to unpack the 'relations' activated by the database industry since the 1970s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper traces the career of Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) as they made their way into the management of India’s corporate and government data in the 1980s and 90s and sometimes blurred the distinction between the two. RDBMS 'freed' data from the structure of the computer system, allowing for unprecedented mobility and access to data that undergirded the service economy of the aughts.

What the paper takes on, as a specific object of focus, is the arrangement, storage of digitized data of public bureaucracies and the many relations it gave rise to. This is a site where both the potential and the risk of RDBMS is at its most apparent. The career of RDBMS in government shows us that the modularity in the arrangement of data and better reach and access, sits side by side with the risks this arrangement of data poses. Thus, studying the historical development of RDBMS allows for understanding some of the excesses of the present- spectacular leaks and hacks, mundane system breakdowns, errors and loss of data, a predicament I name 'slow violence'. The paper draws on archival research among India’s Planning Commission Files from the 1970s at the National Archives of India between May and July 2019 and media archive of computer journals and popular newspapers of the 1980s and 90s. It also draws on my ethnographic fieldwork of land records database management systems at multiple administrative bureaucracies and National Informatics Centers in India between Sept 2018 and Nov 2019.