Hi, I am Rajesh Veerarghavan. I am an Associate Professor in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service
I study how digital technologies shape governance, accountability, and everyday public service. My work bridges computer science and sociology to understand how information systems, especially in welfare and development contexts, can empower marginalized citizens.
Right now, I am on research leave at Princeton University as an AI Policy Fellow at the AI Lab, working with federal agencies to advance the responsible use of AI in public services. I am also co-leading Symbiocene, a forthcoming university living lab connecting research and practice on sustainability transitions..
You could contact me at rv408@georgetown.edu
What’s New:
On research leave at Princeton as AI Policy Fellow working with the US federal government.
Co-leading Symbiocene, a forthcoming University Living Lab on Sustainability Transitions.
Short bio:
I am an Associate Professor in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (Science, Technology & International Affairs), affiliated with the Center for Digital Ethics and the Massive Data Institute (MDI). I study how digital technologies shape governance, accountability, and social change. My research examines how digital systems are negotiated in practice, with attention to the micro-politics of implementation and the everyday labor behind technological change.
Featured Work
Book
📘 Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India
Oxford University Press, 2021
An ethnography of one of the world’s largest welfare programs. The book examines how adaptive practices, devised in response to local resistance, use technology to surface information, enable citizen oversight through social audits, and shift power toward workers.
My book Patching Devleopment, won the Honorable Mention for the 2023 SPAR Book Award organized by the American Society for Public Administration!
Won the Honorable Mention Award for the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Development's Book Award, 2022
[ Learn more → Book ]
AI in Public Services
I am developing sociotechnical frameworks and evaluation benchmarks for AI systems in public services, focusing on how automation changes human oversight and everyday work. This research is part of my Princeton fellowship and collaborations with U.S. federal agencies.
Research (Overview)
Three threads run through my work:
Information and Accountability in Development – How digital tools mediate relationships between the state and citizens in large-scale programs.
Sociotechnical Governance of AI – How automation reshapes human oversight, trust, and labor in government workflows.
Institutional Adaptation and Learning – How bureaucracies change from within through iterative, bottom-up innovations.
My work connects technical and qualitative approaches to understand how digital systems affect governance and everyday life, with a focus on marginalized citizens. I use ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews, software building, and machine learning. Most of my fieldwork has been in India (Maharashtra, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Delhi), with collaborations in the United States, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Kenya.
I began as a computer scientist interested in development. I worked six years as a software developer at Microsoft, then joined Microsoft Research India. I co-founded Digital Green, which has grown into a major agricultural outreach organization.
I hold a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (School of Information). I was advised by Peter Evans, AnnaLee Saxenian, Paul Duguid, and Michael Burawoy. I was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute (with Patrick Heller) and a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center. I have consulted for the Gates Foundation and the Transparency and Accountability Initiative.
BOOK
Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India
Oxford University Press, 2021
Short description: An ethnography of one of the world’s largest welfare programs. The book examines how adaptive practices devised in response to local resistance use technology to surface information, enable citizen oversight through social audits, and shift power toward workers.
Honors
• Honorable Mention, American Sociological Association Sociology of Development Book Award (2022)
• Honorable Mention, SPAR Book Award, American Society for Public Administration (2023)
Order: https://www.amazon.com/Patching-Development-Information-Politics-Social/dp/0197567827
How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms? Political will and good policy design are critical but often insufficient due to resistance from entrenched local power systems. Patching Development is an ethnography of the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in Andhra Pradesh. It asks what happens when social-movement-led reform meets the heavy hand of bureaucracy. The book traces how an anti-worker nexus adapts through coercive counter-strategy and information asymmetries, and how upper-level bureaucrats respond through a continuous series of fine-grained, iterative, socio-technical “patches” that make implementation visible and enlist marginalized citizens through social audits. This expands the conventional wisdom about how centralized state institutions can adapt to realities on the ground by leveraging technology and localized information.
Podcast about the book, https://lnkd.in/e9esPUhn
CURRENT Projects
AI in Public Services – Developing sociotechnical frameworks and evaluation benchmarks for AI systems used in U.S. welfare programs.
I am currently an AI Policy Fellow at the AI Lab at Princeton University, collaborating with federal agencies to advance the responsible use of AI. My work develops sociotechnical frameworks and evaluation benchmarks for AI in public services, exploring how automation changes human oversight and everyday work.
Urban Spatial Observatory – Mapping spatial inequality in Delhi to understand how administrative structures shape access to public services.
Symbiocene Living Lab – Designing a collaborative research platform linking universities, practitioners, and funders around sustainability transitions.
SELECTED PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
• Naveena Karusala, Sohini Upadhyay, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Krzystzof Gajos Understanding Contestability on the Margins: Implications for the Design of Algorithmic Decision-making in Public Services: In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’ 2024). Association for Computing Machinery, May 2024, Article No: 478 Pages 1-16.
Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Atul Pokharel. Governance by Patching: A Comparative Analysis of Adaptive Policy Implementation." Studies in Comparative International Development (2024): 1-23.
Wilcox, L., Shelby, R., Veeraraghavan, R., Haimson, O., Erickson, G., Turken, M., & Gulotta, B. (2023). Infrastructuring Care Ecologies: How Trans and Non-Binary People Meet Health and Well-Being Needs through Technology. (Best Paper Award)
Nithya Sambasivan, Rajesh Veeraraghavan. 2022. The Deskilling of Domain Expertise in AI Development. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’ 2022). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, Article 587, 1-14.
Azaghu Meena, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Nithya Sambasivan, Vivek Srinivasan, Vinodh Kumar, and Shivani Kapania. Inheriting Discrimination: Datafication Encounters of Marginalised Workers in India. IEEE/ACM Int’l Conference on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, Seattle, USA, 2022, 17 pages.
Rajesh Veeraraghavan. Cat and Mouse Game: Patching Bureaucratic Work Relations by Patching Technologies. PACM: Human-Computer Interaction: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), Vol. 5, No. CSCW1, Article 186, Pages 1-21. April 2021. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
Vivek Srinivasan, Rajendran, Narayanan, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Vibhore Vardhan. Are Technology-enabled Cash Transfers Really ‘Direct’? Economic and Political Weekly, 53(30), Pages 58-64, 2018.
Rajesh Veeraraghavan. Strategies for Synergy in a High Modernist Project: Two Community Responses to India’s NREGA Rural Work Program. November 2017. World Development Volume 99, Pages 203-213.
Megan Finn, Janaki Srinivasan, Rajesh Veeraraghavan. Seeing with Paper: Government Documents and Material Participation. “Documents and Work track” (authorship equally shared) HICCS. Hawaii, January 2014. ***Best Paper Award under Digital and Social Media Category***
Rajesh Veeraraghavan. Dealing with the Digital Panopticon: The Use and Subversion of ICT in an Indian Bureaucracy. IEEE/ACM Int’l Conference on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, Cape Town, South Africa, December 2013.
Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Naga Yasodhar, Kentaro Toyama, Warana Unwired: Replacing PCs with Mobile Phones in a Rural Sugarcane Cooperative. Information Technologies & International Development, Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp 81-95, Spring 2009.
*** Best of ICTD Special Issue ***
11. Rikin Gandhi, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Kentaro Toyama, Vanaja Ramprasad. Digital Green: Participatory Video for Agricultural Extension. Information Technologies & International Development, Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp 1-15, Spring 2009.
*** Best of ICTD Special Issue ***
[ Full publications → Google Scholar ]
RESEARCH IMPACT BEYOND PAPERS
Digital Green
Co-founded to work with marginalized farmers on sociotechnical solutions. Visit Digital Green here.
Urban Observatory
Founder. Uses socio-spatial data to study unequal urban development and outcomes. Supported COVID-19 relief operations. See more information here.
CONTACT
Here is how to pronounce my name. https://namedrop.io/rajeshveeraraghavan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajesh-veeraraghavan-884bb5/