Can civil society organisations 'afford' to confront corruption? analysing the design and intended use of three Indian digital anti-corruption platforms

From strategic policy pronouncements of national governments (Athique 2019) which seek to use information and communication technologies to uplift its poor, to cashless economies (Mader 2016; Mukhopadhyay ​​2016), to the design and use of digital technologies in efforts of collective action (Mattelart 2015), experiences with the digital in Asian societies are manifold and varied. Notably, the move towards the digital by state actors in Asian countries has happened with the rise of international good governance, transparency and accountability discourses even while civil liberties have been increasingly curtailed in these societies, including increasing restrictions on digital participation. In such spaces, can civil society actors afford to fight corruption using digital tools? In this paper, I attempt to answer this question studying three Indian civil society organisations (CSO) and their tech platforms: Janaagraha (whose web-based platform, I Paid a Bribe, registers citizen complaints on bribery), Association for Democratic Reforms (with its open data repository and app providing information on electoral candidates) and CGNet Swara (a community radio initiative using Interactive Voice Response technology to give voice to rural grievances). The paper uses constructivist grounded theory to analyse qualitative data gathered over the years 2021 and 2022, including 15 in-depth interviews with relevant stakeholders, public reports, white papers and media appearances of the initiatives. I argue that to understand how CSOs can address corruption in sensitive political contexts using digital means, we need to focus on the design-end affordances of their tech platforms - in other words, the possibilities of use of a tool granted by the inherent architecture of the platforms and those that are imagined by designers as intended use. Even while the initiatives might not outright claim that they are fighting corruption, their tech platforms provide a better view of their goals and intended outcomes. This, in turn, can help us better understand the local narratives around fighting corruption which are mainly focused on improving citizen participation and deepening democracy as promoted by these initiatives.