The Platform Question: Power, Accountability and Global South The Platform Question: Power, Accountability and Global South CHAPTER 5 Platformed Lives: Technology, Accountability, and the Reshaping of Everyday Work By Carina Singh, Khush Vachharajani and Rakshita Swamy Over 90% of India’s workforce remains informal, characterized by low wages, insecure employment, and a near-total absence of social security protections. While precarity has intensified and real wages have stagnated over the past few years, a complex architecture of digital technologies has also been introduced into the everyday lives of workers. These technologies demand not only empirical scrutiny but also critical reflection grounded in the principles of natural justice, social accountability, and workers’ rights. Initiatives such as Aadhaar, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) systems, facial recognition technologies, and the broader imagination of IndiaStack have been central to this digital reform project. While presented as instruments of modernization, transparency, and inclusion, their emergence cannot be understood purely as a domestic policy shift. Rather, India’s digitization push reflects a transnational convergence of state ambition, international financial influence, corporate and philanthropic interests. International financial institutions such as the World Bank, along with global philanthropies including the Gates and Ford Foundations, have promoted digital identity and interoperable data systems as efficient, “leak-proof” mechanisms for welfare delivery and financial inclusion. Simultaneously, domestic industry networks and policy entrepreneurs, most notably the India Software Product Industry Roundtable (iSPIRT) designed the technical architectures and policy frameworks that legitimize the integration of private actors into public service delivery. This coalition has rapidly produced near-universal biometric identification, centralised welfare transfers through the 88 Platformed Lives: Technology, Accountability, and the Reshaping of Everyday Work India’s digitization push reflects a transnational convergence of state ambition, international financial influence, corporate and philanthropic interests. Platformed Lives: Technology, Accountability, and the Reshaping of Everyday Work 89