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This article explores the political economy of groundwater-led agrarian transformation in dryland India through the expansion of groundwater irrigation and rice production since the 1990s. Within this process, I speak to aspirations by subsistence farmers and imaginaries by state governments for agricultural commercialisation via expanding and investing in irrigation infrastructures. In India, this has largely been driven by private and decentralised investments by smallholder farmers. Theoretically adding to the literature on water infrastructures, development aspirations and groundwater governance, I find how farmer aspirations of rice cultivation and associations of the crop with food security and status drove the debt-laden and capital-intensive rapid adoption of groundwater irrigation in dryland Telangana, aided by specific discourses and electricity subsidies policies post the formation of the newest state in India in 2014. I find that political discourses of historical inequalities over water in the struggle for state formation of Telangana in 2014 mobilised electricity subsidies as a key lever to re-imagine the state as a rice bowl of India through groundwater expansion, producing uneven political economy and ecological repercussions for farmers. This article finds that while rice production increased in a short period in Telangana, it came at the expense of widespread well failures and indebtedness at the farmer and village level colliding with the fragile semi-arid climate and hard rock aquifer setting in the state, deepening distress and decay from depleted water infrastructures and failed aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, large parts of India and the global South have experienced a rapid transformation from mud to cement houses, which has been promoted by governments and cement companies for its positive impacts on household socioeconomic status and gender inequalities. But we know little else about how different communities are participating in house transformation. In this paper, I study the embodied and affective dimensions of house transformation in Himachal Pradesh, India. I argue that house transformation is also the transformation of traditional gender and caste identities into new middle‐class identities which benefits some social groups, like upper‐caste women and Dalit men, but not others like Dalit women along intersectional lines. My work extends literature in infrastructure studies and urban political ecology by highlighting how the materiality of infrastructures interacts with everyday dimensions of difference to reproduce the marginalisation of historically oppressed groups along intersectional lines of class, caste, and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between the arrival of early mobile communication technologies and the emergence of reality television (TV) contestants from the Northeast region, particularly Assam. It argues that such networked communication infrastructures enabled marginalised and aspirational publics to mobilise and assert their identities in an evolving mediascape; specifically, how these publics deploy telecommunication and media infrastructures to acquire media visibility. This correlation is examined via the success story of Debojit Saha—the first reality TV star from the Northeast. Significantly, his win was credited to a rigorous, coordinated SMS voting campaign conducted by local student and socio-political unions. Hitherto marginalised regional identities emerged as key players in development of the digital television culture in a neoliberal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid19 pandemic has led to speculation about the place of offices in the future world of work – while working-from-home was initially mandated by employers (and governments), recent research has reported that the practice has gained popularity among employees. However, most such research is based on experiences of workers in the Global North. The article challenges the conflation of the Global North with global and shifts the focus from 'flexible working' and 'work-life balance' to issues of access to work infrastructures, including space, internet, and care. It draws upon existing scholarship on home-based work and precarious work, especially gig work, to outlines ways to analyse the implications of working-from-home in diverse settings. Illustrated with the story of Prachi, a young e-commerce worker in Delhi, the article offers work-from/at/for-home as a wider framework that accounts for inequalities in labour and life conditions of workers around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Reliance Jio's offer of 4G services, guaranteeing free voice calls and 'unlimited' data streaming, lead to disruption in the Indian telecom market with other cellular operators losing their revenue and customer base. To comprehensively analyze this churn in the Indian telecom industry and its impact on mobile phone customers, the article argues for observing the entanglement of infrastructural and platform-related discourses at three levels of operation: Jio's strategies to capture the Indian telecom market and the responses by the leading incumbent service provider (Airtel), ordinary citizens' phone use practices and infrastructural encounters, and the government's vision for India's digital future. Connecting pipes to platforms, Jio made infrastructural investments (in spectrum, cell towers, and fiber optics networks) to promote its suite of apps (JioTV, JioChat, and JioMoney). Ordinary citizens relate their access/proximity to telecom infrastructure (cell antennas) to their ability to effectively use apps on their phones. 'Digital India' vision purportedly facilitated infrastructural growth to create platforms that would support demonetization and facilitate transparent governance. Through such a three-pronged analysis, I conceptualize 'infrastructural imaginaries' that are coproduced by states and citizens, and lie at the intersection of structured state policy/corporate initiatives and lived experiences/affective encounters of ordinary citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]