Whatever the shortcomings of the AADHAAR project, it is probably the most important (for public welfare) national infrastructure project in the recent past. It has been absolutely pivotal in onboarding a large fraction of India's population on to 4G mobile services and digital payments infrastructure. It also serves as the backbone of India's "Direct Benefits Transfer" approach to welfare, which helps circumvent the massive corruption endemic in the previous means of distribution. This is arguably the backbone of the IT revolution necessary to upgrade governance infrastructure to the twenty-first century, for a billion people.
There's still a lot of room to debate cases of mis-handling, privacy issues, implementation details, etc. but calling it a mass surveillance project is just plain wrong. It is basically India's analogue to "Social Security" in the US. It is very easy to criticize AADHAAR from the perch of the english-speaking elite (who never face almost any of the problems that AADHAAR solves), but one needs to empathize with the problems of the bottom ~third of the country (~400M people) living in abject poverty -- to even start having a meaningful discussion about the pros and cons of the approach.
Smearing a programming language by association is further just flagrantly in bad faith!
- For a thorough explanation, see: https://tigerfeathers.substack.com/p/the-internet-country
- Nandan Nilekani & Viral Shah even wrote a book laying out the vision behind the system: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27420086-rebooting-india
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There's still a lot of room to debate cases of mis-handling, privacy issues, implementation details, etc. but calling it a mass surveillance project is just plain wrong. It is basically India's analogue to "Social Security" in the US. It is very easy to criticize AADHAAR from the perch of the english-speaking elite (who never face almost any of the problems that AADHAAR solves), but one needs to empathize with the problems of the bottom ~third of the country (~400M people) living in abject poverty -- to even start having a meaningful discussion about the pros and cons of the approach.
Smearing a programming language by association is further just flagrantly in bad faith!