Rajesh Veeraraghavan is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Information, UC Berkeley, and a research fellow at the Transparency and Accountability Initiative at the Open Society Foundation. Rajesh questions the widespread belief that information technology can be used to "solve" either development or governance "problems," both by engaging in activism involving technological interventions and by using empirical methods to critically examine claims about the impact of ICT in governance. He studies how information and communication technology (ICT) is used in practice to regulate economic, social and political relationships.
Rajesh's PhD dissertation is an ethnographic examination of a bold "open government" experiment intended to eliminate corruption at the local "last-mile" of the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The government project takes place within the context of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA), which aims to support India's poorest citizens by guaranteeing a minimum level of employment for rural families. With the aim to eliminate corruption, the state instituted “social audits” and online record keeping, to improve government records and bureaucratic compliance, but the outcomes were found to depend greatly on existing state-citizen dynamics. Based on his findings, Rajesh recommends that open government projects go beyond the rhetoric of democratizing information to the more challenging task of democratizing administrative surveillance.
While at the Berkman Center, Rajesh will explore the use of high-resolution satellite map data to improve the quality of public infrastructure in India. Remote sensing data can be used as a starting point for material audits by providing a way to track built infrastructure and to enhance administrative surveillance. By monitoring the building of roads, canals, and other infrastructural assets and comparing it against project documents, it should be possible to create a "deviation report" that identifies and quantifies local corruption on a scale that was not possible before. Building on findings from his dissertation, the system will be a socio-technical system that relies on on-the-ground partners and human intermediaries both to detect and confirm deviations, as well as to celebrate creation of public assets.
Previously, Rajesh was an associate researcher at the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India. His work focused on building appropriate technologies for socio-economic development. One of his projects there was the first in the context of developing-world rural ICT to replace an existing PC-based system with a mobile-phone system; the system communicated information between a sugarcane cooperative and its member farmers via SMS. His work led to several research publications as well as non-profit spin-off called Digital Green on whose board he serves. Before MSR India, he worked as a software developer at Microsoft in the United States and was an active volunteer with the Association for India's Development. Rajesh has degrees in Computer Science, Economics and Management.
For more information see http://ischool.berkeley.edu/~rajesh