This book has highlighted the messiness intrinsic to the popular narratives of poor children from low-income neighbourhoods in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Academic research, government discourse, policies, and media corporations have generated these popular narratives. These popular narratives identify the poor children in Azad Nagar, Munnekollal, and Seemapuri as victims—relying on the protection and opportunities afforded by digital technologies. These narratives burden the already vulnerable children with the task of challenging historical and deep-rooted systems of oppression in their communities. Popular narratives bracket the digital engagements of children from marginalised groups and low-income settlements to meet the expectations of pre-tailored technological interventions designed by macro structures of power. Also, several academic studies have analysed children's digital engagements using binary categories such as risk versus protection and empowerment versus oppression. A review of academic literature, state-led policies and programmes, available media products and services, and popular narratives reveals that poor children are sometimes identified as vulnerable groups who need help and protection to negotiate contemporary inequities of caste, class, gender, and religion. Simultaneously, these children are labelled deviants who neither work hard nor use their access to digital technologies for developmental purposes.

This messiness in the popular narratives describing children's engagements with digital technologies in the three low-income urban settlements is convenient for neoliberal and macro institutions of power for two reasons. First, such notional messiness allows the macro institutions to convert poor children into a market segment and target audience to promote the businesses of giant media corporations.