Writing on technology in India (for instance, on nuclear
energy, dams, biotechnology) has tended to see it as a 'problem,'citing
concerns of risk, environmental impact, or equity. In relation to
democracy, technological change has largely been understood as
anti-democratic, raising issues of displacement, secrecy, corruption,
concentration of knowledge and control, and unequal access and benefits.
Within popular discourse, by sharp contrast, technologies such as mobile
communication devices and cars are celebrated as both symbol and
evidence of modernity and upward mobility.In this paper, I take an
agnostic approach, examiningeveryday technologies of production in the
fisheries of Kanyakumari district, Tamil Nadu. In the last two decades,
the district's fishing villages have seen both an appreciable degree of
upward mobility, and a marked decline of resources. Both changes
arelinked to a dramatic technological shift, from kattumarams powered by
hand and sail and reliance on experiential knowledge and skill, to
massive craft with powerful engines, and the ubiquitous use of GPS, echo
sounders, and wireless to track fish. The story of technology in the
transformation of the fisheries has, thus,either been subsumed within
that of markets and modernization, or written of in the tropes of loss
described above -- resource collapse, unequal access, and indebtedness.
Can we think instead of the complex ways in which technology creates
logics and effects of its own, increasing physical mobility, efficiency,
ease, speed, efficacy? How do the assemblages of technology, markets for
input and output, state and NGOs, potential and declining fish
resources, and adaptive, creative fishermen, generate their own publics?
Without pointing one-sidedly to the liberatory potential of new
technologies,can we move beyond seeing them as necessarily destructive,
or having inegalitarian consequences, to think more expansively about
the ways they reshape ideas of space, community, distance, power,
aspiration and possibility, and pose new political problems -- of
sustainability, credit, regulation,fuel, knowledge, innovation and
skill, and work relations? An inquiry along these lines, by locating
technology at their intersection can be potentially productive for
debates around resource sustainability;knowledge, innovation and
skill;and (in)equality, mobility and democracy.