Paper Title: “The Living Dead”: Orphaning in Aadhaar-enabled Distribution of Welfare Pensions in RajasthanAuthors: Ranjit SinghJournal: PUBLIC Journal: Art Culture IdeasVolume: 30Issue: 60Pages: 92-104Year: 2020 Abstract: This paper follows the mutual shaping of the lives of citizens and their data records to illustrate how precarious forms of citizenship emerge in the use of biometrics-based data infrastructures for governance. It presents a case […]
Histories of Infrastructuring
Author: Ranjit SinghWorkshop: Fostering Historical Research in CSCW & HCI Venue: The 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Date: 10 November 2019 Abstract: This paper outlines the evolution of my work to narrate the history of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based national identification infrastructure, in one of my dissertation chapters. I describe how and why this […]
Managing Aadhaar’s Scale
Paper Title: Give Me a Database and I Will Raise the Nation-StateAuthors: Ranjit SinghJournal: South Asia: Journal of South Asian StudiesVolume: 42Issue: 3Pages: 501-518 Year: 2019 Abstract: This paper draws on an ethnographic study of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based national identification infrastructure, to investigate how members of its design team conceptualised and understood their techno-bureaucratic enterprise of assigning unique numbers to Indian […]
Whose fault is it anyway?
“I do not understand why certain activists blame Aadhaar in this pension case. Aadhaar is designed to store only four data attributes about a person and their biometric information. It only guarantees uniqueness of their record with us. If you ask the database to confirm a person’s identity using their fingerprints, we only certify that […]
Action at a Distance
“Data collection always has errors. Spelling mistakes in names, wrong dates of birth, incorrect or makeshift addresses… the list can go on. The work is also so time-consuming that we have had to outsource it. So, there are new private sub-contracting agencies that also add to large-scale errors in data collection and curation. Language is […]
The Living Dead
“I once heard that you only die when no one remembers you anymore. But, death has many forms. I have thought about death a lot. I am an old man after all. I have lived an honest life; my family always had food on the plate when I could work. That’s the least I could […]
Seams that Matter
Paper Title: Seams that Matter in Approaches to Study Processes of Marginalization Author: Ranjit Singh Workshop: Solidarity Across Borders Venue: The 21st ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), New York Date: 4 November 2018 Abstract: This paper outlines the trajectory of my ethnographic research on the design and use of India’s national biometrics-based identification project, […]