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Paper short abstract:

Rural entrepreneurs running digital kiosks in Indian villages navigate the tensions presented by the double pursuits of community development and profit making. Their lived experience of entrepreneurship is that of dependency, to which they fuse their own desires of self-determination.

Paper long abstract:

Rural entrepreneurs running digital kiosks are vital agents of the Indian government’s flagship e-governance program, that brings much needed 'development' to neglected communities. My study sheds light on how they navigate the tensions presented by the double pursuits of community development and profit making, while being dependent on the program's parameters and logics. Planners of the program laud its public-private partnership (PPP) model and juxtapose economic wins with risk and volatile income possibilities. Critiques highlight the precarity and uncertainity that drive entrepreneurs to seek economic opportunities outside the program‘s prescribed norms. While arguments of both frameworks are valid, they fail to critically engage with entrepreneurship as a mode of economic subjectification wedged between expectations, aspirations, compromises and renouncement.

The figure of the rural entrepreneur encapsulates three cross cutting impulses – provision of governance services, beneficiaries (and benefactors) of the state’s focus on livelihood generation in rural areas, and vital infrastructures for new sites of capital accumulation. My ongoing research with Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs) asks how they actively imagine and interpret the multifacetedness of their role, which are sometimes at odds. To be an entrepreneur is to make these tensions functional and complementary through deliberate action. Their lived experience of entrepreneurship is that of dependency, to which they fuse their own desires of self-determination. The program's rural entrepreneurs are the vocational embodiments of the tensions that arise from the open-ended amalgamations of giving disenfranchised people access to rights while at the same time generating new markets supported by government backing.