Aakash Solanki

Aakash Solanki

PhD candidate in Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, researching the genealogy of states, statistics, and computing.

About

Aakash Solanki a PhD candidate in Anthropology and South Asian studies at the University of Toronto. He is broadly interested in the genealogical study of states, statistics (stats), and computing. In the past, he has worked on the collection, classification, management of information and its politics in colonial India. In addition to prior training in computer science, he has worked in government agencies both in the US and India, on data science projects in education, health, and skill development at the city, state, as well as the federal level. His research is funded by the International Development Research Center (IDRC) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He has previously published in the journal South Asia and is a Contributing Editor to the journal Cultural Anthropology. He runs an interdisciplinary seminar series on Development at University of Toronto.

Research

News

Writing

with Mertia, S., “India’s start-ups are not lacking innovation but imagination.” The Indian Express, 2025.

“Untidy Data: Spreadsheet Practices in the Indian Bureaucracy.” In Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India, edited by Sandeep Mertia. Theory on Demand 39. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. 2020.

A book chapter contributed to a multi-disciplinary volume on data cultures from India. The volume brings together practitioners and researchers working on data science projects in India, both contemporaneous and historical. The piece examines spreadsheet processing in an Indian bureaucracy through the lens of statistical data processing and media technologies, and how media technologies — old and new — intertwine to produce work practices in bureaucracies.

Listen: New Books in Technology podcast on Lives of Data

Management of Performance and Performance of Management: Getting to Work on Time in the Indian Bureaucracy, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 42:3, 588–605. 2019.

This paper departs from the analytic lens of citizen versus the state and brings to attention intra-bureaucratic interactions in the wake of Aadhaar by focusing on the ongoing implementation of an Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System (AEBAS). Based on ethnographic research in a North Indian state, it shows how AEBAS’ goals of performance evaluation and management were partially, and unintentionally, circumvented by staff members, in part owing to the socio-technical design of the system. An unintended consequence of projects using digital media technologies to quantify and manage performance is their tendency to produce a performance of management.

with Tewari, S., Going Ethno in the Indian Bureaucracy, Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2016(1): 501–21.

A case study contributed to the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry conference on how to assess and improve digital literacy and state capacity in government agencies in India using anthropological research on state, governance, and bureaucracy.

“Suddenly, Statistics?.” Member Voices, Fieldsights, May 2018.

A piece contributed to the Academic Precarity in American Anthropology: A Forum by Cultural Anthropology on the dissonance between anthropology’s general suspicion of numbers and a sudden push for statistics in addressing the problem of precarity in American anthropology.

Teaching