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Amid public data from users audacity8/12/2023 According to another Mint report in August, three states had discovered about 272,000 fake student names who were availing the mid-day meal (MDM) scheme. Financial daily Mint reported in May 2017 that over 23 million fake ration cards had been scrapped, potentially saving the government Rs 14,000 crore in food subsidy every year. Leakages in the public distribution system came down significantly. While the debate surrounding Aadhaar’s use raged into a firestorm, the fact was that the new digital infrastructure had begun doing its job. This realisation has caused widespread anger against these companies for enabling innocent, unsuspecting citizens to become hooked on to addictive services, in turn, for subtly getting them to sign away their right to privacy. In fact, it has become increasingly apparent that every time a service is provided for free, the users themselves become the product. This proves that there indeed is no free lunch. WhatsApp founder Brian Acton in an interview after his departure from Facebook revealed explosive details of how Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg were arm-twisting WhatsApp founders to serve targeted advertisements to users. At the same time, there was a global debate over how digital giants like Facebook and Google, which had access to tons of data, were surreptitiously commercialising and misusing this data without full disclosure. There were genuine worries over what a state, with the intention of misusing this access to data, could do to citizens in general and political opponents in particular. The possibility of having one massive database linking all information about a citizen was a cause of concern to many people. In addition, corporate India also began using Aadhaar to establish the identity of their employees. Others began suggesting linking property records with Aadhaar. In fact, they see this as a one-time opportunity to clean up a lot of the dirt of post-independent India’s history. On the other hand, the technocrats and the pro-Aadhaar group view the implementation of Aadhaar as serving a public good, one that can be used to solve many of India’s ‘wicked’ and seemingly unsolvable problems. These claims may seem a bit far-fetched, but they were enough to sow the seeds of doubt by creating an impression that there can indeed be no smoke without fire. To make their case, they cite examples of high-profile technocrats who were involved with the project early on, in a volunteering capacity, and are now building businesses that leverage this infrastructure. Instead, they believed Aadhaar was a means for technocrats to create a digital infrastructure that private companies could exploit for commercial use. To be sure, the debate surrounding Aadhaar has been dominated mostly on the one hand by civil liberty activists who believe Aadhaar was never about inclusivity or ensuring efficient delivery of welfare measures in the first place.
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