The Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) Nuffield - FLAME University is pleased to host Dr Petra Sonderegger, Senior Project Manager at Dalberg Asia and Ms Akanksha Agarwal, Senior Consultant at Dalberg. They  will be giving a talk titled “The State of Aadhaar 2019: A People's Perspective."

Abstract:

The debate on Aadhaar has often centred on legal, policy and fiscal perspectives. Nation-wide data on the perspectives of those who use Aadhaar in their daily lives has been thin. We believe it is important to include and highlight the residents’ perspective, in particular to understand what works and what doesn’t, on the ground.

To that end, Dalberg, supported by Omidyar Network India, surveyed over 167,000 households across 28 states and UTs to uncover people's experiences with and perceptions of Aadhaar. This has resulted in the largest public primary dataset on national Digital ID, anywhere in the world.

Dr Petra Sonderegger and Akanksha Agarwal will present a rich condensation of the many findings from the study. Her presentation will cover enrolment – who is enrolled and who is not (and why), experience with updates and problems encountered, how widely Aadhaar is used, for which services, and how it impacts people’s access to services, and finally, what are people’s perceptions of Aadhaar’s benefits and challenges. Her presentation will also address some of the current debates in the Aadhaar discourse today. Finally, she will also introduce the dataset and its potential applications in Aadhaar-related research and beyond.

Bio:

Dr Petra Sonderegger, Dalberg Asia

Dr Petra Sonderegger manages research projects for Dalberg Asia. She is currently managing the State of Aadhaar 2019-2020 project and was a co-author of the 2019 report. Her research focus is on economic development and technology. She has conducted research on the influence of communications technology on economic geography, on innovation systems, as well as specific sectors, such as telecommunications, fintech, and renewable energy.

Petra holds a PhD from Columbia University, New York, for which she completed a dissertation on the role of telecommunications in the development of economic clusters. She also holds an MBA from the University of Bern, Switzerland. Petra was a Columbia Public Policy Consortium Fellow, a Swiss National Science Foundation Young Scholar, and a senior research associate at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

Akanksha Agarwal, Dalberg

Akanksha Agarwal is a Senior Consultant in Dalberg’s Mumbai office. She has worked on assignments across Digital ID, financial inclusion, digital payments, healthcare, and education, with a focus on programme and policy evaluations. Her primary focus on State of Aadhaar initiative was research design and survey implementation.

She is a graduate in Civil Engineering from BITS Pilani and her development sector interests lie at the intersection of policy, technology, and gender.