Show Notes
Our first exploration of The Vaporstate takes us to India, home of Aadhaar: a mammoth digitisation project that charts a path from technical solution for public service delivery, through mission creep and popular opposition, to a knotty but inescapable part of Indian existence today. More like this: Is Digitisation Killing Democracy? w/ Marietje Schaake
Joining Alix for part one of The Vaporstate is Mila Samdub, Astha Kapoor, and Usha Ramanathan. Together they discuss the conception of Aadhaar, India’s key piece of digital public infrastructure, and how it morphed from a simple digital ID to something that unifies payments, phone plans, and biometrics. Further reading & resources: More about Usha Ramanathan — legendary lawyer and activist who has been pushing back on the Aadhaar programme for over a decade More about Astha Kapoor — co-founder of the Aapti Institute More about Mila Samdub — designer, writer, and CyberBRICS Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society, FGV Rio Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology — by Abeba Birhane et al, Nature Journal Aadhaar 2.0 workshop Walmart Takes Ownership of PhonePe from Flipkart — The Times of India, 2022 Walmart invests $200 million in Indian mobile payments giant PhonePe — TechCrunch, 2023 Google launches India mobile payments app Tez — BBC, 2017 Identity Verification Standards in Welfare Programs: Experimental Evidence from India — Karthik Muralidharan et al, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021 Aadhaar: Costs of Digital Red Tape — Reetika Khera & Amod Moharil, Economic & Political Weekly, 2024 Overload, Creep, Excess – An Internet from India — Nafis Hasan et al, Institute of Network Cultures, 2022 Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India's 12 Digit Revolution — Shankkar Aiyar, Westland, 2017 **Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!** Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou
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