Priyanka Dass Saharia

Priyanka is a trained anthropologist and ethnographer. Her experience has primarily been in early seed to venture stage start-ups and social enterprises building the right systems to develop traction especially around identifying strategic areas of impact aligned to ESG/SDGs and regulatory benchmarks.

Hailing from the ethnic conflict affected region of Northeast India, peacebuilding through community engagement and civic advocacy is a core element of Priyanka’s motivation. She is especially passionate about building local ecosystems for development of small businesses. Priyanka has presented her work at the Royal Anthropological Society, Durham University, University College London, and IIT Delhi, and written for online journals such as International Political Forum and Warscapes.

Digital Identity and distributed technologies adoption in India: The AADHAR Project

Under SDG16, target 9 envisions a legal identity for all by 2030. Currently, compared to 73% of children under 5 as a globe, only 46% of Sub Saharan Africa fills this quota. Lack of birth registration means locked opportunities from health to financial services.

Making this SDG16 investable, big corporates like Accenture and Microsoft under their managed service providers, Avanade Inc. PWC, Cisco ID2020 have their skin in the game. The business case is financial inclusion. Add to this mix, an ongoing pandemic, the core stake at hand, a digital identity becomes an imperative to reboot the economy, massively made of SMEs, especially in the Global South.

Addressing this need, countries like India launched the largest digital programme in the world, Aadhar under the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) in 2009. Though the first unique identity was issued in 2010, with a commendable influence in the microfinance space, the project has run into several bumps in its rollout and adoption.

One important highlight has been the controversy, linking Aadhar with the NRC (national register of citizenship) and Citizenship Act into possible regimes of exclusion, in turn triggering nationwide protests in 2019, especially in the north-eastern region of Assam, a state with decades long diabolic political history of unregulated immigration from Bangladesh.

Through the lens of blockchain backed Aadhar project, this talk would explore the trajectory of distributed technologies adoption in a specific social context and the various benefits and challenges that come along with it.