MONTHLY SEMINAR SERIES
NORTH EAST INDIA STUDIES PROGRAMME
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY
For those who wait: Money, Time and Infrastructures in Manipur, North-East India
Nima Lamu Yolmo
University of California-Irvine, USA & Visiting Scholar, NEISP
Since the 1990s, efforts towards financial literacy and financial inclusion have increasingly veered towards cashless digitized payment systems. In more recent times, NGOs, telecommunications providers, banks and philanthropic organizations have advocated digital technologies based on their potential to eliminate trips to distant banks and long queues (IMF Financial Access Survey 2016). The lack/inadequacy of infrastructures, within such a framework, tend to be regarded as primarily as hurdles to be overcome in transitioning to a more efficient transactional system. In this paper, I seek to problematize this framework by drawing from my field-work experience in Manipur where ATMs frequently break down, and banks are regularly beset with “link-failure.” As long hours of wait around these infrastructures have become commonplace, general conversations on the use and changes brought about money infrastructures tend to meld seamlessly into commentary on rising prices, frequent shutdowns, corruption, state apathy, exclusion from “development”, and “taxation” by insurgent groups. I argue that focusing on the everyday realities in Manipur --with its stark security and infrastructural concerns, as well as earlier histories of thriving trade and commerce (Cederlof 2014) -- enables us to better assess the assumed ameliorative potentials and portable efficacy of digitized financial inclusion efforts. Furthermore, attending to the generative influence and pragmatics of money infrastructures in places like Manipur has the potential to crucially inform and expand our horizons of what money can mean or do.
DATE: January 19, Friday, 2018
TIME: 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
VENUE: Room no.324, 3rd Floor, SSS-I, JNU
ALL ARE INVITED
