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: Interview with Balbir Guleria, a village level entrepreneur (VLE) at a Lok Mitra Kendra (or Common Service Centre) at Drang, Mandi district, Himachal Pradesh and jointly runs CTMS Study Centre along with his brother. In this interesting interview, Balbir introduces us to the services he offers as a VLE, the financial structure a VLE gets into, in terms of working capital requirements, low demands that he has to contend with and the workflow of these processes. This preview into the lives of VLE’s remains fairly consistent across other states that we conducted field work in. For more see Identity Project Short film
