Ranjit Singh: The Curious Case of Tweeting an Aadhaar Number

The Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center presents a talk by Ranjit Singh of the Data & Society Institute 

His talk will explore data security practices of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based national identification number, and the co-constitution of trust and mistrust that underlies its operation as a public data infrastructure. Based on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic research, he will present tensions around whether Aadhaar numbers were designed to be disclosed publicly or kept confidential. His paper further maps identification practices around how residents share their Aadhaar numbers with other government and private organizations to access services. These practices to promote the sharing of Aadhaar numbers broke down with growing anxieties over their public disclosure on government websites, lack of audits and emerging forms of Aadhaar-based frauds. 

Ranjit Singh is a researcher at the “AI on the Ground Initiative” of the Data & Society Research Institute. His research interests lie at the intersection of data infrastructures, global development and public policy. His current research projects invigorate existing efforts to reframe the Global South as home to the majority of the human population and investigate the diverse ethics, politics and experiences of living with and regulating data and AI.