Reportage on a planet without equitable or sustainable development.
should aadhaar be junked?
The last 60 days have not been good to India’s much-feted Aadhaar project.
On the 30th of January, the UPA pressed the pause button on direct benefits transfer for cooking gas. On 26 February, the Mumbai High Court directed Aadhaar to share its biometrics database with the CBI. A year earlier, a seven year old had been raped in Goa. And the investigating agency, struggling to make headway, had asked the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for biometrics it had collected in Goa. UIDAI refused to share information saying such a move would violate privacy of its number-holders and that its biometric database and deduplication systems were not designed for forensic inquiries. In response, the CBI went to the Mumbai High Court which directed UIDAI to share its database.
The third blow fell on 24 March when investigative journalism portal Cobrapost aired videos that allegedly showed UIDAI’s enrolment agencies agreeing to enrol people from neighbouring countries in return for a bribe. Between them, these three events underlined long-standing questions about the Aadhaar project.
Between them, these three developments highlighted large worries about the ambitious Aadhaar project. Read more here.
I am an Indian journalist with interests in energy, environment, climate and India’s ongoing slide into right-wing authoritarianism. My book, Despite the State, an examination of pervasive state failure and democratic decay in India, was published by Westland Publications, India, in January 2021. My work has won the Bala Kailasam Memorial Award; the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award; and five Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism. Write to me at despitethestate@protonmail.com.
“Westland closure: Titles that are selling fast and a few personal recommendations,” by Chetana Divya Vasudev, Moneycontrol. (Because this happened too. In February, a year after DtS was released, Amazon decided to shutter Westland, which published the book. The announcement saw folks rushing to buy copies of Westland books before stocks run out.)
Fractured/Earth 
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