| Summary/Abstract |
The essays in this special section demonstrate—in case anyone still believes otherwise—that the Aadhaar project is an exceptionally interesting problem for contemporary social science. Nandan Nilekani’s impossible programme of capturing proof of the names, births, addresses along with fingerprint and iris biometrics from over a billion people has revealed new features of the politics of networked technologies, of bureaucratic rationality, and of ordinary people’s strategies for dealing with both. The project has both changed globally-held perceptions of the possibilities for new forms of state capacity and confirmed the old, Arendtian view of bureaucracy’s capacity for banal evil.
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