Description: "India's global success in the Information Technology industry has also prompted the growth of neoliberalism and the re-emergence of the middle class in contemporary urban areas, such as Bangalore. In her significant study, BITS of Belonging, Simanti Dasgupta shows that this economic shift produces new forms of social inequality while reinforcing older ones. She investigates this economic disparity by looking at IT and water privatization to explain how these otherwise unrelated domains correspond to our thinking about citizenship, governance, and belonging. Dasgupta's ethnographic study shows how work and human processes in the IT industry intertwine to meet the market stipulations of the global economy. Meanwhile, in the recasting of water from a public good to a commodity, the middle class insists on a governance and citizenship model based upon market participation. Dasgupta provides a critical analysis of the grassroots activism involved in a contested water project where different classes lay their divergent claims to the city"--
Review Quotes: "An engaging and important book that re-frames the widely studied field of IT in India in novel and interesting ways. Simanti Dasgupta offers new insights in her juxtaposition of IT and water distribution, and shows how neoliberal politics in India are deeply embedded in gender and caste hierarchies. Illuminative, BITS of Belonging deserves to be widely read."--Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity