Summary: The Identity project emerged as a result of our dissatisfaction at the nature of the debate that was emerging on the area of digital governance in India.
Over the past three years we have conducted numerous field visits in seven Indian states.These visits include numerous video-conversations, some short and others very long, with a diverse number of those who were involved with this entire process of participating in the emergence of a digital ecosystem of governance. These are interviews with people being enrolled into the Aadhaar programme, with district-level Panchayat and other officials, with numerous State government bureaucrats, with private enrollment representatives, representatives of various governmental services, with operators and other members of this digital workforce. Conversations are often long, spontaneous and deliberately unstructured: and the focus is mainly on a vérité style using amateur video.
Some key issues that we shortlisted for detailed inquiry were issues of migrants, both domestic and across international borders, homelessness in cities, and the financially excluded. Each of these areas was discussed in considerable detail at major public consultations held in Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Bangalore, in partnership with the CSDS, the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, and the Urban Research and Policy Programme Initiative of the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. All videos of all presentations made at these events are also available here.
CSCS also has an extensive text archives of material on the field as a whole, available on
http://eprints.cscsarchives.org.
Clip Summary: Rama Shankar Naik, Collector and District Magistrate, Kurnool
(Video in English)
The collector explains the distinctive features of the district and various government interventions over the past few years. He draws attention to the socio-economic profile of the Kurnool district. He elaborates on suicides of MFI borrowers and the problems caused by the MFIs and the action taken by the District Administration. The action taken by the district administration in increasing institutional credit are also highlighted. He concurs that there is scope for increasing the credit from formal financial institutions though there are problems that exist in banks response to providing credit. He draws attention to the need for bankers to visit the villages so that it not only helps in assisting the farmers but also understanding the problems of the farmers.
