Degenerative outcomes of digital identity platforms for development

Abstract

Digital identity platforms are widely regarded as important means to improve social protection systems. Yet these platforms have been implicated in the production of a range of unintended outcomes for development beneficiaries. To clarify how digital identity platforms enable the production of one such outcome that we call degenerative, because it causes target systems to deteriorate, we conduct a case study of the incorporation of Aadhaar, the world's largest digital identity platform, in India's primary food security scheme. Based on the data from two South Indian states, we show how the incorporation produced degenerative effects in the access, monitoring, and policy layers of the social protection system. These effects lead us to theorise how Aadhaar enabled the degenerative outcome via exclusion, distortion, and redirection, making public distribution of subsidised goods displaceable in favour of cash transfers.

Understanding the Functional Components of Technology-Enhanced Learning Environment in Medical Education: A Scoping Review

“…Digital capability has shown to improve the digital performance and hence the overall learning experience in online platforms [ 62 ]. In the era of virtual communities, digital identities have developed with the need to secure their access and monitoring via various policies [ 63 ]. It is important to know how to behave in these environments, and hence, digital civility is another paradigm which has come up with increasing use of technology and social media for education.…”

“…These interactions allow the leaners to have a sense of community with peer learning in a constructive manner. The social representations also represent the digital identity of the student which is again important to develop as a part of professional identify formation [ 63 ].…”

Orchestrating a digital platform ecosystem to address societal challenges: A robust action perspective

“…Datafication has, however, been associated with various risks such as the potential for loopholes and legal challenges (Krishna, 2020; Singh, 2020), data breaches (Avila-Maravilla and Mali, 2018), violations of norms of data justice, and pursuit of perverse policies (Masiero and Bailur, 2021a, 2021b). Furthermore, negative unintended consequences or “degenerative” outcomes are possible (Masiero and Arvidsson, 2021).…”

The digitization of the Brazilian national identity system: A descriptive and qualitative analysis of its information architecture

“…In the literature, one example of exclusion from services for the use of digital identities comes from Masiero and Arvidsson (2021), who show how the incorporation of Aadhaar in the PDS, a food security scheme, excluded genuine beneficiaries that could not be authenticated by biometric due to failure in the technology. Another example from Aadhaar is the starvation death case of 11-year-old Santoshi, whose family was excluded from the list of beneficiaries of cheaper priced food grains obtained via ration cards because they did not have an Aadhaar number (Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition, 2021).…”