🥇If There’s One Story To Read Today Falling for techno-utopia? Indian states’ tryst with family database projects “In the last ten years or so, we've seen a completely lacklustre bureaucracy which has absolutely no imagination for creative solutions beyond databases. It’s like they are creating a bridge without a river,” says advocate Prasanna S, summing up the Indian state governments’ obsession with data-based governance. The most recent experimentation is reliance on the State Family Database project for providing family IDs to all residents for maximum governance. The current master plan for creating a “golden record” of citizens, experts say, is an intrusive exercise to extract more information from people in order to provide welfare. Also, it comes with a promise of being the one “unique” proof of a person’s existence, just like Aadhaar! As Indians are time and again made to choose between privacy and welfare, MediaNama attempts to decode the harms of the project on people’s fundamental rights in the world’s largest democracy. Read this 14-minute story here. Click here to subscribe to MediaNama Daily and receive the best of tech policy in your inbox. 🗓 Your Tech Policy Agenda Improve your argument: A roundtable discussion on "Intermediary Classification in India" is being organised by The Quantum Hub and Centre for Policy Research on February 7, 2023. This is a hybrid event. Click here to register. Good old extensions: The IT Ministry extended the deadline for seeking stakeholders' views on the draft amendment to the IT Rules, 2021, till…
