No policy domain in contemporary India enjoys more uncritical celebration than digitalisation. The International Monetary Fund treats India’s digital public infrastructure as a model for the developing world. The World Bank hails the India Stack – Aadhaar for identity, UPI for payments, Account Aggregators for data governance – as a “game-changer for economic development.” Bill Gates declares that no country has built a more comprehensive digital platform. The scale figures are staggering: 1.44 billion Aadhaar numbers issued, 577 million Jan Dhan bank accounts opened, over 21 billion UPI transactions processed in January 2026 alone, worth approximately Rs 28 trillion. Across the political spectrum, digitalisation is treated as an unqualified national achievement.It is against this celebratory consensus that Digitalisation in India: The Class Agenda, edited by the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE) and published by the Three Essays Collective, makes its decisive intervention. The book assembles 13 essays that collectively constitute the most comprehensive class analysis of India’s digital transformation to date, covering the macroeconomy, employment, welfare delivery, health, education, urban governance, financial technology, agriculture, and India’s position in the international digital division of labour. Its central proposition is that India’s digitalisation drive constitutes a comprehensive class project: one that withdraws the state from public provisioning, transfers public resources to corporate capital through unaccounted subsidies, atomises collective social institutions into individualised customer relationships, and deepens India’s subordination to imperialism, all the while deploying the language of “inclusion,” “efficiency,” and “empowerment” to conceal these dynamics.‘Digitalisation in India: The Class Agenda,’ edited by Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE), Three Essays Collective, 2024.The book’s analytical method is its greatest strength. It transforms the question from the technocratic “does digitalisation work?” to the political-economic “whose interests does digitalisation serve?” And answers it, devastatingly, with evidence drawn from the proponents’ own documents. The IMF’s papers are shown to be “short on actual evidence.” The World Bank’s widely cited claim of $11 billion in fiscal savings from Aadhaar-linked direct benefit transfers is exposed as a misrepresented statistic. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s finding that claimed LPG savings were exaggerated by a factor of thirteen, with over 90% of subsidy reduction attributable to falling global petroleum prices rather than Aadhaar, demolishes the flagship fiscal argument for digitalisation using the state’s own auditor. And Nandan Nilekani, the architect of Aadhaar, provides what may be the book’s single most revealing admission: “We felt speed was strategic. Doing and scaling things quickly was critical. If you move very quickly, it doesn’t give opposition the time to consolidate.” This is not the language of democratic development. It is the logic of fait accompli.The opening chapter, authored collectively by RUPE, establishes that India’s digital adoption was not voluntary but was imposed through three great traumas: demonetisation in November 2016, which invalidated 86% of cash in circulation; the Goods and Services Tax, which devastated the informal sector; and the Covid-19 lockdown, which the Reserve Bank of India’s own think tank CAFRAL described as “an opportunity for FinTechs.” The chapter dissects what it calls the “magical thinking” that pervades India’s digitalisation discourse – the treatment of digital technology as a substitute for genuine public investment. When the Economic Survey 2014-15 proposed that linking Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar, and mobile phones would bring economic “Nirvana,” the invocation of religious transcendence to describe a payment mechanism was not incidental. It captured the essence of a discourse that equates digital service delivery with actual benefit received, a conflation that the book dismantles sector by sector.The macroeconomic chapters, by Arun Kumar and RUPE, establish the essential context. India’s official GDP growth averaged 5.9% between 2014-15 and 2023-24, down from 6.8% in the preceding decade. But the problem runs deeper. The GDP estimation methodology uses organised sector data as a proxy for unorganised sector output, on the assumption that the two move in tandem – an assumption that collapses precisely when demonetisation, GST, and the pandemic lockdown were devastating the unorganised sector, which produces 45% of output and employs 92% of the workforce. No survey of unorganised enterprises was conducted since 2015-16 and the book’s preparation; the government has since begun publishing a new Annual Survey of Unincorporated Enterprises (ASUSE), whose data are presumably being used for the new GDP series with 2022-23 as the base year. Nominal GDP figures have been revised somewhat downward, but not much is yet known about how the new series has been arrived at, and the fundamental critique of the earlier period’s statistical blindness remains intact. Kumar estimates actual GDP growth at between 2.5 and 3.5%, with a cumulative loss of approximately Rs 84 lakh crore. This critique has received powerful post-publication validation: a March 2026 working paper by Arvind Subramanian, India’s former Chief Economic Adviser, found that India’s GDP growth was overstated by 1.5 to 2% points annually between 2012 and 2023, with real GDP overstated by approximately 22%. The core methodological flaw identified – that the government used formal sector data to estimate informal sector growth – is precisely the error Kumar dissects in the book. The period of India’s most intensive digitalisation was, by any honest reckoning, a period of economic deterioration, not transformation. That 810 million citizens require free food grain from a government that simultaneously proclaims economic triumph tells its own story.The chapters on welfare delivery constitute the book’s most devastating empirical contribution. They document how mandatory Aadhaar-based authentication has automated the exclusion of the most vulnerable from food, work, and wages. A J-PAL survey found that 88% of ration cards cancelled in Jharkhand due to Aadhaar “failures” belonged to genuine households. The mandatory linkage of MGNREGA job cards to the Aadhaar-Based Payment System resulted in 76 million workers being deleted from the system over twenty-one months. Over 100 starvation deaths have been linked to Aadhaar-ration card authentication failures. As Jean Dreze observed, claiming success in reducing corruption through such means “is like shooting at the tyres of a car and counting the reduced traffic as a bonus.” What the government counts as “savings” from weeding out “ghost” beneficiaries is, in a significant proportion of cases, the denial of food to the hungry. The state’s overriding concern is with inclusion errors, benefits reaching the “ineligible”, rather than exclusion errors, which cost citizens their rights and, in documented cases, their lives.Equally compelling is the book’s analysis of the gig economy. Anurag Mehra demonstrates that what is celebrated as the rise of platform entrepreneurship is, in substance, the informalisation of labour under a new label. NITI Aayog projects the gig workforce to grow to 23.5 million by 2030, while the ILO estimates India already accounts for roughly 20% of the global platform workforce. The data on working conditions is damning: food delivery workers on long shifts worked 69.3 hours per week for a net income of Rs 13,581 per month, while comparable workers in other employment earned more than double the hourly rate. Uber drivers surrendered 25 to 30% of earnings to the platform. The Oxford Internet Institute’s Fairwork India project found that no major platform scored more than six out of ten on labour conditions, and not a single platform demonstrated willingness to recognise a collective body of workers. The platform model depends upon the atomisation of the workforce and the suppression of collective bargaining, precisely the dynamic the book identifies as central to digitalisation’s class function.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyHussain Indorewala’s chapter on the Smart City Mission introduces the concept of the “toll-booth model” of urbanisation: the systematic transfer of government functions, public assets, and service delivery to private corporate entities, with digital technology as ideological cover. The numbers are stark: 81% of Smart City funds were allocated to Area-Based Development projects which, across 75 cities, impacted on average less than 5% of the total city area. In large cities, only about three out of every hundred residents benefited. Basic services, solid waste management, drainage, sewerage, roads, and water supply received a mere 20.9% of total spending. The chapter documents how multinational consulting firms – KPMG, Deloitte, PwC, McKinsey, Cisco – captured the urban planning process itself, functioning as what KPMG’s own review report called “an extended arm” of the implementing agencies. A former Chief Secretary of Madhya Pradesh described this as “the beginning of governance of the city being outsourced” to market players. Integrated Command and Control Centres, the centrepiece digital infrastructure, excelled at surveillance and policing during the pandemic but proved useless for distributing food, medicine, or shelter. The technology served its intended class purpose with precision.The chapter on financial technology demolishes the claim that “financial inclusion” represents genuine progress for the poor. Bank account ownership rose from 53 to 77% between 2014 and 2021, driven by over 500 million Jan Dhan accounts. But over the same period, the proportion of account holders making deposits fell from 47 to 29%, savings in any form fell from 38 to 24%, inactive accounts rose to 35%, and the average Jan Dhan balance stood at a mere Rs 4,000 against a system average of Rs 32,000. Most revealing: 69% of Indians reported being unable to raise emergency funds within 30 days. Meanwhile, digital lending has created a new infrastructure of extraction. Of 14,000 start-ups founded between 2016 and 2021, nearly half were in fintech, with 44% of fintech funding flowing to digital lending. A LocalCircles survey found that 26% of digital loan users were charged an annual interest of 50 to 100%, 16% were charged over 200%, and more than half reported extortion or data misuse during collection. The chapter draws a devastating historical parallel with the Andhra Pradesh microfinance crisis, where 54 suicides were linked to specific microfinance institutions, and argues that the same structural dynamics, international capital, explosive growth, usurious extraction, and regulatory abdication are being reproduced at digital speed. If such lending constitutes “financial inclusion,” rural usurers have been practising it for centuries.The chapter on agriculture may be the most rigorous in the collection. It begins not with digitalisation but with the actual conditions of India’s peasantry. Of India’s 147 million agricultural holdings, 86% are under two hectares. Farmers cultivating less than one hectare cannot meet consumption expenditure from all income sources combined. Between 2012-13 and 2018-19, average household income from crop cultivation fell nearly 9% in real terms. Half of all agricultural households report being in debt, with average outstanding loans of Rs 74,121, equivalent to 7.25 times monthly income. Between 1995 and 2019, nearly 3.65 lakh peasant suicides were recorded. Against this backdrop, the chapter examines the India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA) framework, the government’s plan to construct an AgriStack modelled on the India Stack. The chapter deploys a telling analytical device: a word count of the IDEA consultation paper. The terms loan, debt, suicide, MSP, caste, Dalit, women, forest, and climate change each receive zero mentions. The document was published only in English. Corporations were not invited to participate after the framework was designed; they were present from inception, with memoranda of understanding signed with Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Jio, and ITC before the “consultation” process began. Ninety-one farmer organisations and digital rights groups wrote to the government protesting that the exercise was taking place “in a legal vacuum.” The consequences are structurally anti-peasant. Since the AgriStack is built on existing land revenue records, it will systematically reinforce the disentitlement of tenant peasants, landless Dalits, Adivasis with unresolved forest rights claims, and women cultivators, 86.5% of whom lack land titles despite contributing the bulk of agricultural labour. The Telangana Land Records Updation Programme of 2017 offers a grim precedent: an attempt to “purify” land records digitally produced a flood of exclusions, corruption, and suicides by dispossessed peasants. Farmer organisations have drawn an apt analogy with ride-hailing platforms, which offered attractive terms until traditional supply chains were destroyed and then exploited their captive workforce; with four corporations already controlling 70% of India’s commercial seed supply, digitalisation threatens to extend such concentration into every dimension of agricultural decision-making. The chapter’s immanent critique of the World Bank’s own report on digital agriculture is equally effective: the report’s internal admissions include “mixed” evidence on digitalised extension improving yields, “little or no evidence” on the profitability of precision farming, and “scant” evidence on digital credit. Yet the IDEA framework explicitly cites this report as its foundation. The agrarian question in the digital age remains, at its core, the agrarian question, and no amount of data, platforms, or APIs will resolve it without confronting the class structure of Indian agriculture.The book’s capstone chapter situates India’s domestic class project within the international architecture of imperialism. Market concentration data is difficult to dispute: Meta controls 91% of social media, Google 98% of search, Amazon and Walmart 89% of e-commerce in India. India’s mobile phone “manufacturing” amounts to assembly of imported components, with net exports of phones and inputs worsening from minus $12.7 billion in 2016-17 to minus $21.3 billion in 2022-23. The Production-Linked Incentive subsidy of 4 to 6% of phone value may actually exceed the value added in India, estimated at just 1.33%. The chapter contrasts this with China’s divergent path, where the legacy of socialist development, sustained public investment, and active state regulation of capital produced indigenous technological capabilities that now challenge US dominance, to demonstrate that India’s digital subordination is a consequence of the political-economic character of its ruling class, not a technological inevitability. Mukesh Ambani’s trajectory encapsulates the contradiction: in 2019 he called for a “new movement against data colonisation”; within months, Jio had sold $20 billion in shares to Facebook, Google, and Qualcomm, the very corporations accused of colonising Indian data.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyThe book is not without weaknesses. Some repetition between chapters is inevitable in a multi-author collection. Certain chapters, particularly the one on online education, which originated as a blog post, are thinner than others and rely more on international examples than Indian data. The book does not address surveillance in depth, nor does it elaborate a programme for alternative, democratically controlled digital infrastructure. These gaps mark out the territory for future work rather than diminish the present contribution.The book’s most important intellectual contribution is a dialectical position that is neither technophobic nor technophilic. As the opening chapter argues, digital technology “could be used to decrease the drudgery of certain types of work; it could be used to facilitate various types of collective work; it could even improve the operations of a socialist planned economy.” The problem is not digital technology itself but the social relations under which it is deployed. The India Stack’s reduction of customer acquisition costs from Rs 500-700 to Rs 3 per person is simultaneously a 10 to 12 billion dollar public subsidy to corporate capital. The 520 million Jan Dhan accounts coexist with 69% of Indians unable to raise emergency funds. The 15 billion monthly UPI transactions coexist with over 100 starvation deaths linked to Aadhaar authentication failures. The question is not whether India has built an impressive digital architecture — it manifestly has. The question is whether that architecture serves the 92% of workers in the unorganised economy, the 86% of agricultural holdings under two hectares, the 50% of agricultural households trapped in debt, or the corporations, both domestic and foreign, that dominate every digital market category.For working-class and peasant movements confronting the daily realities of digitalisation: cancelled ration cards, deleted job cards, predatory lending apps, platform exploitation, dispossession from urban spaces, this book provides what has been conspicuously absent: an analytical framework that connects their specific experiences to a coherent understanding of the class project being carried out in the name of “Digital India.” The gig worker’s algorithmic subjection, the farmer’s data dispossession, the welfare recipient’s biometric exclusion, and the small retailer’s displacement by predatory e-commerce are not isolated “implementation failures” to be corrected by better design. They are structural features of a system that is working as intended. That the technology itself cries out for different social relations, for deployment in the service of human needs rather than corporate profit, is not a counsel of despair but a call to transform the relations of production that determine who benefits from India’s digital transformation and who pays for it.Bappa Sinha is a technologist.