Is India's digital identity program — Aadhaar — helping the marginalized communities or is it working against them? Yoti's Digital Identity Fellow Subhashish Panigrahi discovers more in this first episode of the MarginalizedAadhaar Podcast. (read more about the fellowship at https://yotifellows.com)

From its inception Aadhaar has been marketed by its makers as the most reliable identification for public benefits. But human rights advocates feel the other way. And they all the reasons to do so. Several facts suggest systemic exclusions for many of India's marginalized peoples and the aggressive push for including every person's private data on a database to finally use the same data for mass surveillance. Aadhaar has been oversimplified as a 12-digit unique number that can be used to authenticate at a point of service — government or private. However, it is tied to a person's biometric data like fingerprint and iris scan, and a range of personal data. The complex role that Aadhaar plays in the lives of some of the most marginalized communities is what Yoti Digital Identity Fellow Subhashish Panigrahi aims to study through the project MarginalizedAadhaar.

In the first episode of this podcast, rights activist and author Raghu Godavar discusses about the systemic exclusions in the enrollment and use of Aadhaar. With help from Parsuram Harijan, Gori Keuta and Ratan Naik of the Taragan village of Nabarangpur dist., Odisha, India tell how they have been denied of food grains and ration for months and years. And finally, human rights lawyer and researcher Usha Ramanathan dissects Aadhaar's fundamental design to pinpoint the system issues with Aadhaar.

Attribution:

Producer: Subhashish Panigrahi, Digital Identity Fellow, Yoti

The Sora song that can be heard in the background was originally performed by Srinivas Gomango and is under CC-BY-SA 4.0. The other sound effects and music used are from Freesound.org (ATM.wav, ambience03.wav, Hip Hop9_90_BPM.WAV, Hip Hop8_90_BPM.WAV and Hip Hop6_90_BPM.WAV under CC0 1.0; ATM Insert Card.wav under CC Sampling Plus 1.0; fingerprint auth accepted.wav, Slow Sad Tones.wav, curfew announcement #2.wav and Ambient guitar X1 - Loop mode under CC BY 3.0) all under Creative Commons licenses.

Download the uncompressed .WAV version from Internet Archive.

The Aadhaar Of All Exclusions

MarginalizedAadhaarBy Subhashish PanigrahiApr 12, 2020