Rise of the Digital Financial Ecosystem in India: The Political Economy of Platforms, Gaps and Trends for Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines mobile phone penetration and digital financial inclusion in India, with a focus on how digital policies shape information practices and impact marginalized users. Using India’s post-2016 demonetization period as a case study, the research critically investigates how the government’s push for a cashless economy, primarily facilitated through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), has restructured digital access while simultaneously generating new forms of financial exclusion. Although UPI was designed to foster financial inclusion, marginalized micro-entrepreneurs—particularly those in the informal sectors—continue to face significant barriers to adoption, including low literacy, digital illiteracy, distrust in digital transactions, and infrastructural limitations. Grounded in platform studies, and development studies, this dissertation employs a multi-sided class analysis to examine both the lived experiences of marginalized micro-entrepreneurs and the policy power dynamics between public and private institutions that shape India’s digital financial platform economy. Through qualitative interviews with micro-entrepreneurs, particularly artisans, the study reveals a complex relationship with digital payments: while some benefit from convenience and remote transactions, many remain reliant on intermediaries due to usability challenges. This mediation dependency raises concerns about financial autonomy, digital exclusion, and the reproduction of structural inequalities. Findings underscore critical policy gaps in India’s digital financial ecosystem, highlighting that technological availability and affordability alone do not guarantee meaningful inclusion. The dissertation argues that the current system exacerbates information asymmetries and economic marginalization, limiting disadvantaged communities’ participation in the formal digital economy. As a unique contribution, this research proposes a methodological framework for assessing the viability and sustainability of digital platforms for marginalized users. This framework offers insights into platform governance, infrastructural challenges, users’ information practices, and policy interventions necessary to enhance digital financial inclusion, with broader implications for platform economies across the Global South.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".