Video credit: Harish Boya
Episode 3 Articles
What we learned at the identities roundtables
Over the past few weeks we’ve presented in three cities: Delhi, Bengaluru, and Washington DC. In each city, we invited a hand-picked audience of 20 to 25 people to work with us for an afternoon as we shared early insights on our research and went through an exercise based on personas from our work. We wanted to immerse the participants in the experiences of our research subjects, and then to look at identity services from the bottom-up, as users have to. Here are the key themes and insights from the roundtables.
What happens when other people claim the objects most central to your identity as their own?
There are many objects in our lives that we treasure because they define part of our identity - informal types of identity as much as the formal kind embodied in a card or document. We've seen a social shift towards individualism and individual expression.
What happens when a country gets a new identity card?
Many people see value in the efficiencies that Aadhaar brings, but our research is also finding that there continue to be uses for the other, older forms of official identity – like voter ID, PAN and ration cards – that shouldn’t be dismissed lightly.
Photo credit: Emrys Schoemaker