Seeking signs of transparency:audit, materiality, and monuments to active citizenship in New Delhi

摘要

In New Delhi, the Chief Information Commissioner has ordered that municipal councillors should 'proactively disclose' details of the amounts spent on public works via Hindi-language noticeboards displayed in every city ward. As 'appropriate' technology designed to reach out to the common people, the noticeboards are part of an ongoing technomoral project to develop and democratize citizen engagement with urban governance. An audit of the noticeboards carried out by Information Commission officials and 'right to information' activists reveals that many are badly positioned or assembled from inappropriate materials. As such, they are judged to be unreliable actants in the project to prefigure a more open and transparent city administration. A focus on the materiality and temporal orientation of the noticeboards, however, reveals them to be productive in other ways. We come to understand the noticeboards as monuments to earlier projects of active citizenship and as ongoing sites of contest or collaboration between actors concerned with their audit and remediation.