Can I Meet the Server: Peripheral Land and Digital Encounters

Digitsation of state institutions and particularly of land-records in India are disrupting the geographies of property making. These practices are inflicting small and medium towns, i.e. the non-metropolitan centers in far more complicated and unclear spatial structures. Cowan (2021) while writing about the process of land digitsation in the peri-urban villages of Gurgaon observes, ‘digital infrastructures seldom constitute a clean break’. India has had a long and contested history of colonial and post-independence efforts to register and formalize land ownership (Cowan 2021). The onus of proving ownership though now has fallen on the citizens, rather than the state. It forces the citizen to furnish paper evidence and materiality to be recognised and registered in the digital realm.

This paper presents an ethnographic exploration of waiting in a notified urban town in the Jharkhand district in eastern India. Focusing on the transformation of ancestral property papers into digital spaces amidst a lack of institutional support. It highlights the duality of waiting: citizens endure long hours for bureaucrats to arrive and for computer servers to function and brokers and middle men to negotiate on behalf of them. This waiting is not just a logistical hurdle; it reflects the broader lived experiences of residents who navigate opaque state systems while attempting to secure property rights. The research sheds light on how these everyday negotiations shape their reality in the context of a shifting bureaucratic landscape especially for those who lack the social capital and financial means to overcome and bypass the waiting.