Aadhaar is the world's largest identity project that enrolled a billion residents. alongside Nandan Nilekani, the author led a brilliant team in developing the technology that undergirds Aadhaar, enrolled the Resident population of India, created an online authentication mechanism for the digital world, and operationalize the ecosystem to take advantage of the new identity. This book is a first-hand account from the trenches which provides a lucid and in-depth understanding of the artefact called Aadhaar and how it continues to change and redefine India.

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.

Aadhaar, India's unique identity system, was introduced in 2009 with the stated purpose of creating a more inclusive and efficient welfare system. Hundreds of millions of Indians were enrolled into the biometric database, with successive governments creating pressure by making it compulsory for social benefits. Even after the Supreme Court verdict in 2018, it remains a must-have for welfare.Dissent on Aadhaar argues that Aadhaar was never really about welfare. The essays in this book explain how the project opens the doors to immense opportunities for government surveillance and commercial data-mining.Focussing on Aadhaar, but drawing lessons from ID projects from other parts of the world also, this book alerts readers to the dangers lurking in such expansive digital ID projects. For example, how profiling, made possible by Aadhaar, impinges on the fundamental Right to Privacy; or how surveillance leads to self-censorship and can choke free thought and expression; or how Aadhaar, contrary to government claims, excludes people entitled by right from welfare when made compulsory.

A colorful and revealing portrait of the rise of India’s new billionaire class in a radically unequal society India is the world’s largest democracy, with more than one billion people and an economy expanding faster than China’s. But the rewards of this growth have been far from evenly shared, and the country’s top 1% now own nearly 60% of its wealth. In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India’s new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of America's Gilded Age, funneling profits from huge conglomerates into lifestyles of conspicuous consumption. James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj takes readers on a personal journey to meet these reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons, and shadowy political power brokers. From the sky terrace of the world’s most expensive home to impoverished villages and mass political rallies, Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class, and caste. The Billionaire Raj is a vivid account of a divided society on the cusp of transformation—and a struggle that will shape not just India’s future, but the world’s.

Aadhaar was born in July 2009, yoking modern technology and management expertise to political will. The biometric-based unique identification system, built by tech czar Nandan Nilekani and his team of innovators, was designed to enable subsidies and social spends reach their true destination, plug institutional corruption and save trillions of tax-rupees. In July 2017, Aadhaar is 1.15 billion identities and growing. In Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India's 12-digit Revolution, senior journalist Shankkar Aiyar traces the history of this ambitious, controversial undertaking. He speaks with President Pranab Mukherjee, Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Manmohan Singh, P. Chidambaram, Yashwant Sinha, Rahul Gandhi and others to document how politicians with diametrically opposed ideologies were equally determined to propel Aadhaar. Aiyar maps how Aadhaar's application expanded beyond its original intent. He researches its ups, downs, and turnarounds; discusses the concerns of activists and bureaucrats on potential misuse of the database for state surveillance; raises the urgent need for a data-protection and privacy law and spells out the solutions. An unusual contemporary dramatization, this book is a breathless ride through recent changes in India's political and economic landscape.

A visionary look at the evolution and future of India In this momentous book, Nandan Nilekani traces the central ideas that shaped India's past and present and asks the key question of the future: How will India as a global power avoid the mistakes of earlier development models? As a co-founder of Infosys, a global leader in information technology, Nilekani has actively participated in the company's rise during the past twenty-seven years. In Imagining India, he uses his global experience and understanding to discuss the future of India and its role as a global citizen and emerging economic giant. Nilekani engages with India's particular obstacles and opportunities, charting a new way forward for the young nation.

A timely call to reshape government through technology, from Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah, two leading experts in the field. For many aspects of how our countries are run - from social security and fair elections to communication, infrastructure and the rule of law - technology can play an increasingly positive, revolutionary role. In India, for example, where many underprivileged citizens are invisible to the state, a unique national identity system is being implemented for the first time, which will help strengthen social security. And throughout the world, technology is essential in the transition to clean energy. This book, based on the authors' collective experiences working with government, argues that technology can reshape our lives, in both the developing and developed world, and shows how this can be achieved. Praise for Nandan Nilekani: 'A pioneer . . . one of India's most celebrated technology entrepreneurs' Financial Times 'There is a bracing optimism about Nilekani's analysis . . . which can only be welcome in this age of doom and gloom' Telegraph 'The Bill Gates of Bangalore . . . Nilekani achieves an impressive breadth' Time Nandan Nilekani is a software entrepreneur, Co-founder of Infosys Technologies, and the head of the Government of India's Technology Committee. He was named one of the '100 Most Influential People in the World' by TIME magazine and Forbes' 'Business Leader of the Year', and he is a member of the World Economic Forum Board. Viral B. Shah is a software expert who has created various systems for governments and businesses worldwide.

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.

Migration moves people, ideas and things. Migration shakes up political scenes and instigates new social movements. It redraws emotional landscapes and reshapes social networks, with traditional and digital media enabling, representing, and shaping the processes, relationships and people on the move. The deep entanglement of media and migration expands across the fields of political, cultural and social life. For example, migration is increasingly digitally tracked and surveilled, and national and international policy-making draws on data on migrant movement, anticipated movement, and biometrics to maintain a sense of control over the mobilities of humans and things. Also, social imaginaries are constituted in highly mediated environments where information and emotions on migration are constantly shared on social and traditional media. Both, those migrating and those receiving them, turn to media and communicative practices to learn how to make sense of migration and to manage fears and desires associated with cross-border mobility in an increasingly porous but also controlled and divided world. The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration offers a comprehensive overview of media and migration through new research, as well as a review of present scholarship in this expanding and promising field. It explores key interdisciplinary concepts and methodologies, and how these are challenged by new realities and the links between contemporary migration patterns and its use of mediated processes. Although primarily grounded in media and communication studies, the Handbook builds on research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, urban studies, science and technology studies, human rights, development studies, and gender and sexuality studies, to bring to the forefront key theories, concepts and methodological approaches to the study of the movement of people. In seven parts, the Handbook dissects important areas of cross-disciplinary and generational discourse for graduate students, early career researcher, migration management practitioners, and academics in the fields of media and migration studies, international development, communication studies, and the wider social science discipline. Part One: Keywords and Legacies Part Two: Methodologies Part Three: Communities Part Four: Representations Part Five: Borders and Rights Part Six: Spatialities Part Seven: Conflicts

Social Value Investing presents a new way to approach some of society’s most difficult and intractable challenges. Although many of our world’s problems may seem too great and too complex to solve — inequality, climate change, affordable housing, corruption, healthcare, food insecurity — solutions to these challenges do exist, and will be found through new partnerships bringing together leaders from the public, private, and philanthropic sectors. In their new book, Howard W. Buffett and William B. Eimicke present a five-point management framework for developing and measuring the success of such partnerships. Inspired by value investing — one of history’s most successful investment paradigms — this framework provides tools to maximize collaborative efficiency and positive social impact, so that major public programs can deliver innovative, inclusive, and long-lasting solutions. It also offers practical insights for any private sector CEO, public sector administrator, or nonprofit manager hoping to build successful cross-sector collaborations. Social Value Investing tells the compelling stories of cross-sector partnerships from around the world — Central Park and the High Line in New York City, community-led economic development in Afghanistan, and improved public services in cities across Brazil. Drawing on lessons and observations from a broad selections of collaborations, this book combines real life stories with detailed analysis, resulting in a blueprint for effective, sustainable partnerships that serve the public interest. Readers also gain access to original, academic case material and professionally produced video documentaries for every major partnerships profiled — bringing to life the people and stories in a way that few other business or management books have done.