: The book extensively navigates the complex realm of Aadhaar, India's biometric identification system, tracing its evolution from inception to the contemporary landscape. It underscores the government's initiatives to streamline services and combat fraud, particularly through Aadhaar's transformative impact on subsidy disbursement, exemplified by Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) and the PAHAL scheme. Despite showcasing Aadhaar's benefits, the narrative critically scrutinizes its drawbacks and challenges. Concerns ranging from fraud and data leaks to the potential vulnerability of centralized biometric data prompt crucial reflections on the system's security. The book provocatively addresses privacy concerns, particularly as Aadhaar details become linked with diverse services, revealing instances of unauthorized access and data misuse. The author illuminates the landscape of online threats and scams associated with Aadhaar, exposing the sale of data on websites and unauthorized access to personal information. Cases of unmatched biometrics and the exploitation potential within job-seeking platforms highlight the necessity for enhanced vigilance and stringent security protocols. The book offers an exhaustive exploration of Aadhaar's profound influence on India's identity domain. Balancing the acknowledgment of its merits with a candid exposure of pitfalls, the book presents a nuanced perspective on the complexities of Aadhaar. Real-life examples and critical analyses contribute to a comprehensive understanding, prompting essential questions about privacy, security, and the evolving dynamics of biometric identification in the digital era.

This book explores the interconnected ways in which the control of knowledge has become central to the exercise of political, economic, and social power. Building on the work of International Political Economy scholar Susan Strange, this multidisciplinary volume features experts from political science, anthropology, law, criminology, women’s and gender studies, and Science and Technology Studies, who consider how the control of knowledge is shaping our everyday lives. From “weaponised copyright” as a censorship tool, to the battle over control of the internet’s “guts,” to the effects of state surveillance at the Mexico–U.S. border, this book offers a coherent way to understand the nature of power in the twenty-first century.

The realities of the high-tech global economy for women and families in the United States. The idea that technology will pave the road to prosperity has been promoted through both boom and bust. Today we are told that universal broadband access, high-tech jobs, and cutting-edge science will pull us out of our current economic downturn and move us toward social and economic equality. In Digital Dead End, Virginia Eubanks argues that to believe this is to engage in a kind of magical thinking: a technological utopia will come about simply because we want it to. This vision of the miraculous power of high-tech development is driven by flawed assumptions about race, class, and gender. The realities of the information age are more complicated, particularly for poor and working-class women and families. For them, information technology can be both a tool of liberation and a means of oppression. But despite the inequities of the high-tech global economy, optimism and innovation flourished when Eubanks worked with a community of resourceful women living at her local YWCA. Eubanks describes a new approach to creating a broadly inclusive and empowering “technology for people,” popular technology, which entails shifting the focus from teaching technical skill to nurturing critical technological citizenship, building resources for learning, and fostering social movement. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images found in the physical edition.

Imagining New Legalities reminds us that examining the right to privacy and the public/private distinction is an important way of mapping the forms and limits of power that can legitimately be exercised by collective bodies over individuals and by governments over their citizens. This book does not seek to provide a comprehensive overview of threats to privacy and rejoinders to them. Instead it considers several different conceptions of privacy and provides examples of legal inventiveness in confronting some contemporary challenges to the public/private distinction. It provides a context for that consideration by surveying the meanings of privacy in three domains—-the first, involving intimacy and intimate relations; the second, implicating criminal procedure, in particular, the 4th amendment; and the third, addressing control of information in the digital age. The first two provide examples of what are taken to be classic breaches of the public/private distinction, namely instances when government intrudes in an area claimed to be private. The third has to do with voluntary circulation of information and the question of who gets to control what happens to and with that information.

Weaving together a hitherto unattempted history of making and verifying identification documents, In Pursuit of Proof tells stories from the ground about the urban margins of India, and Delhi in particular. The book moves with agility across the late colonial era and the postcolonial years marked by ration cards, refugee registration certificates, permits, licences, and affidavits. How did the ration card, introduced during the Second World War, crystallize into proof of residence? After the Partition, how did the Indian state classify refugees as poor, displaced, and lower caste? Might there be alternative conceptualizations of the much-maligned ‘Licence Raj’? How does proof manifest itself for those living in Delhi’s slums? And how does the unique identification number, termed the Aadhaar, impinge on rural migrants dwelling in the city? Relying on intensive ethnographic and archival methods, the book answers these questions and theorizes the Indian state as one whose welfare capacities of governing are drawn from popular knowledge practices of documenting and proving identities.

Identification vs profiling; state welfare vs state surveillance; privacy vs transparency—Aadhaar has bitterly polarized India since its launch in 2010. No other project has captured the imagination of the people—or inspired such awe and anxiety—in recent memory. Aadhaar began life with a singular mandate: offer an identity to those Indian residents who didn’t have any. Along the way, it evolved into the welfare state’s flagship technology and altered forever how government, business, and society interact. The Aadhaar Effect is the story of the visionaries—bureaucrats, technologists, activists—who created or challenged India’s biggest juggernaut. It is equally the story of humans conflicted about complex choices that may make the world a better place. Polestar award winners N.S. Ramnath and Charles Assisi dive deep into the 12-digit number that has touched 1.2 billion lives and counting—and in the bargain, made the world sit up and take note of India’s ambition.

Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy in the world—India. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies of inclusion. Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject can afford to ignore.