This paper explores how FemTech platforms appropriate the term ‘care’ to create a collaborative, non-judgmental, and data-driven approach for a sexual and reproductive health condition like Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). In contrast, offline healthcare for PCOS is insufficient owing to disruptions in treatment, gynaecological indifference, and a lack of time and attention to patient concerns. We share findings from an ethnographic study conducted in India, involving interviews and observations with FemTech platform founders, gynaecologists, and people with PCOS. Our study highlights how FemTech start-ups, led by engineering and management professionals, establish a unified digital care approach by capitalizing on the shortcomings of traditional offline gynaecological healthcare infrastructures. We identify the logics of care surrounding FemTech platforms and assess their sustainability as digital alternatives to offline gynaecological care. We offer recommendations to FemTech founders and policymakers to build sustainable and inclusive offline and online health infrastructures.

The centrality of the biometric point of sale (POS) machine in the administration of food security in Indian's public distribution system (PDS) invites scrutiny for its primacy as a non-negotiable artifact in the monthly PDS process. In this paper, I critically examine how the POS machine emerges as a site for varying imaginaries of a technologically-mediated welfare system for the three primary stakeholders of the PDS, consisting of the beneficiaries, dealers, and state administrators. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper traces the histories of interaction and portraitures that the three stakeholders bring to their description and interpretation of the POS machine. It shows that an active POS machine provokes the stakeholders in the PDS to view it as an artifact that invites engagement on practical, moral, and knowledge dimensions. The varying ‘biographies’ that stakeholders narrate of the POS machine, collectively reveal the design, disposition, and functioning of a social justice infrastructure that rests on the compulsions of biometric technologies to improve inclusion and deter corruption in welfare delivery.

This paper reports on the value conflicts that beneficiaries experience when engaging in the monthly ritual of the biometric authentication of their fingerprints to claim state-sponsored food entitlements in India. Drawing on value-based orientations to HCI inquiry, the study locates the interactions around the biometric process to illustrate the ways in which beneficiaries find their values of time, dignity, and privacy, consistently disregarded by the interactive demands of the biometric system. Additionally, to cope with these value conflicts, some beneficiaries pass on the responsibilities of completing the biometric process to the children in their families. While adult beneficiaries are vocal and articulate about the value tensions in their lives, children cope with the anxieties of interacting with the biometric process, silently; even as they experience conflicts in their education, play, and study time.

Public WiFi networks are increasingly viewed as last-mile Internet solutions for rural areas given the infrastructure intensive nature of fibre optic broadband connectivity, but how inclusive are they? This study reports on interviews, observations, and practices around WiFi access points in public spaces in a rural community in India. It illustrates the ways in which Internet savvy women may continue to experience exclusions in Internet access and use. Bound by social norms that restrict their movements and tether them to spotty mobile data, women's Internet usage is limited in comparison to men, whose relatively unconstrained mobility permits them access and use of the free WiFi in the community. Additionally, interviews with a commercial WiFi provider reveals naive assumptions about women's Internet habits and gendered mobilities influencing access. The findings suggest that in certain contexts, women may remain invisible as potential customers despite their desire and ability to pay for WiFi access.

Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) apps such as WhatsApp are heralding new communication behaviors amongst students in peri-urban India. From an ethnographic study of a co-ed engineering college, we describe and analyze the role of WhatsApp in both engendering and balancing the ripples caused by cross gender communication. Through in-depth interviews and immersive participant observations in both physical as well as digital spaces, we show how WhatsApp emerges as the backbone of student interactions in a gender segregated academic environment. In analyzing social conditions and identifying structural features of WhatsApp that led to its bottoms up appropriation, our study presents possibilities for educators and designers aiming to create technology enabled collaborative spaces between people otherwise hemmed in by social norms from reaching out to one another.

The quest for the low-cost computer has been among the primal motivations of innovation and practice in the ICTD world from its very beginnings. We discuss continuing developments in case of the low-cost Indian tablet, Aakash, publicized as the world's cheapest computer, and situate these within a history of India's quest for development through technology in the past two decades. We analyze 212 articles on Aakash and find four dominant themes in the way the device has been discussed in the popular media. These include the cult of a technocratic leadership, the discourse of indigenous technology, the recreation of the Silicon Valley dream, and the face of the marginal user. We argue that Aakash has gone beyond being a technology artifact to a device that represents Indian aspirations at several levels -- as a forward thinking state, an ingenious entrepreneurial class, and an energetic population that needs nothing but access to technology to succeed.

We examine factors that mediate the access and use of public computing centers (PCCs) that are part of a United States government policy initiative to bridge the digital divide. Drawing on in-depth interviews and field observations conducted in the state of Texas, we interrogate how the social settings in which the sites are embedded, influence the way marginalized users approach and use the Internet resources inside the PCCs. Through our analysis, we demonstrate that access and use of PCCs is mediated by factors beyond the mere availability of computing infrastructure and include conditions such as fulfillment of routine life needs, geo-spatial characteristics of sites, availability of transport, and access to alternative sites of Internet access.

Rural communities in India are often underserved by the mainstream media. While there is a public discourse surrounding the issues they face, this dialogue typically takes place on television, in newspaper editorials, and on the Internet. Unfortunately, participation in such forums is limited to the most privileged members of society, excluding those individuals who have the largest stake in the conversation.