That's bullshit. Vidhi pioneered the model by cozying up to ministers. Bureaucrats who did not want to outsource to them and their corporate interests were forced to do it from their political higher ups. How do you think the terrible privacy laws were drafted? Bureaucrats managed to scuttle it repeatedly until Vidhi was brought in.

In other words, the ministers, as people’s elected representatives rightfully exercised the powers conferred upon them by the constitution by instructing the bureaucrats to do what they are bound to do under the constitution. I’m sorry, but what is the problem here? You may not like the privacy laws and how they were drafted. Fair enough. But the process followed was exactly how a democracy is supposed to operate. Vidhi did nothing that other civil society groups have not done before and after. Also, Vidhi has done a lot more than just being a part of the drafting of the privacy laws. No need for such blanket denunciations.

There's a reason a bureaucracy is a part of the executive branch and that civil servants swear their oath to the constitution not to whoever is in power. In your pop political science there should be no bureaucrats and political parties should take over the executive because election is everything. That's not how democracies work. Read a bit about its branches.
Civil society lobbies for causes and is transparent about what and why. Vidhi pretends not to have an agenda and has captured power at a much greater scale. Yes, it did a lot more than destroying privacy. The blanket is much larger.

Imagine trying to defend something as corrupt and rotten as the Indian bureaucracy as an example of constitutional democracy. What a grim joke. Stop pulling the straw man. And stop putting words in my mouth. I said nothing about abolishing the civil service. Read the constitution again. Civil servants are there to assist the representatives of the people in carrying out their decisions in accordance with the rule of law. That is it. Everything else is tangential. There is nothing that Vidhi can do unless the representatives agree first.

CPR was a proper, independent think tank and the BJP ensured that they paid the price for it. Vidhi is just a glorified secretarial agency for the BJP. Please look at Arghya’s sudden position of “decolonisation”. Quite a coincidence that it coincides with J Sai Deepak’s book on the same subject and mirrors the RSS position? Then look at Vishu’s editorials on UCC etc.

This is how a typical Arghya Sengupta newspaper article looks now:

- X is a big problem in the country.

- The roots of X started in the 50s and continued till the early 2000s. Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi and Manmohan Singh themselves admitted their failures in tackling X.

- X has reduced a lot since 2014 and the present government has taken steps (acknowledged by the World Bank) but more needs to be done.

- Our recommendations are…

- This can help achieve the dream of Vikshit Bharat.

You seem to imply here that a think tank is not really autonomous if it agrees or helps with government policymaking. This is an unreasonable condition which emerges from a fundamental lack of trust in one’s own elected representatives. A think tank is there to offer its expertise. Nothing more, nothing less. Sometimes, its ideas will find supporters in the government and sometimes they won’t. How its leadership manages its relationship with the government is their call. And none of that denotes partisanship. Also, to say that CPR was ever an independent think tank is to betray one’s own ignorance of its founding history. It was essentialy one of those ICSSR institutes whose job largely comprised doing impact assessments of government policies; hardly rigorous work. When PB Mehta joined, he made it a more professional and intellectually diverse place, but not necessarily neutral. CPR has done good work but in deciding to join Hasdeo movement (the details of which are admittedly sketchy) it put itself in a spot with the Indian state. In a statist society like India, nothing can survive that is in an adversarial position against the government. Consider other think tanks like Institute of Economic Growth, Centre for Development Studies, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, etc. << https://icssr.org/research-institutes-0 >>. They all occasionally do interesting work. But none of them can survive by explicitly rejecting the consensus of the Indian developmental state and whose authority is backed by its democratic, albeit imperfect, politics.

So, according to you, research should also be democratically driven? If the elected government says you can make Ganesh by conducting plastic surgery on a human and an elephant, then all scientists should join the consensus? If you bothered to read PBM's work you would know that he has argued that democracy is not just about elections but about larger, longer term ways in which people self govern. The point is not 'neutrality' because there is no such thing. But about keeping everyone's power in check through different points of view and bureacratic

Regarding your first two questions, answer is no. Please improve your reading comprehension before wasting the time of others like this. I simply gave a general account of how power is operationalised in India’s democratic politics. That is all. I made no comment on my own view of it because that is not the point here. I am happy you have read Mehta; I think everyone should. But it only further underscores my point. In a democracy, you have to work to make your argument count. “Educate, organise, and agitate”, as the fellow said. Become an intellectual, join civil service, or contest election. If you want change in policymaking, you have to put yourself on the line instead of yapping all the time like some school-grade game theorist about balancing competing interests.

no no. Dont construct fake people. How many? How many real ones? Where are these large scale surveys and reports of people starving because they couldnt get an aadhar made? Are they just in your imagination or do we have any data to support this spectre?

or do you not care to actually find out because youre so high on the feeling of being a good person who cares so much about the poors?

I can help you google baby, don't worry.

https://www.financialexpress.com/policy/economy-denial-of-ration-due-to-non-linking-of-aadhaar-sc-seeks-response-from-govt-2214774/

I even threw in some research about Aadhar harms including for children

https://www.epw.in/engage/article/aadhaar-failures-food-services-welfare

https://www.context.news/digital-divides/indian-children-without-aadhaar-digital-id-shut-out-of-school

No doubt you'll come back to say these are fake too. Sitting with popcorn.

wont do to just google. What did i ask for- large scale survey. What did you provide? Colin Gonsalves claiming in court that millions were starving and dying of starvation because they had no aadhar. What did he base it on? that lakhs of ration cards were cancelled as they were not linked to aadhar. Unless you assume that those lakhs of ration cards were bonafide and theres been a massive conspiracy to hide millions of deaths from starvation- where did the bodies go? lakhs of people dying of starvation would be really difficult to hide! - his claim is already quite sus. aadhar was put into place to ensure that PDS reaches the appropriate end user, eliminating waste and graft by cancelling ration cards that are not connected to real people is actually helping poor people.

EPW article has no survey at all- only a mention of a handful of people who couldnt obtain their card in 2019 because of illness, old age etc. I got my aadhar in 2021, so yes there were teething troubles in accessing aadhar in the initial years- but theres no reason at all to believe its anything more than that- to believe these are persistent or widespread problems today.

Context article points to two students who claim they were not able to attend government schools because they didnt have access to aadhar. The local government denies this has happened at all. Again- no evidence of any widespread or persistent harm. just so you know- aadhar is not mandatory for enrollment in schools- its literally on the UIDAI website

It is of course wrong that any needy person should face additional impediments to access much needed PDS. thats what PDS is there for. but the fact that there are a handful of cases where some people with extremely difficult circumstances has fallen through the cracks does not mean that aadhar on the whole has caused more harm than good. Policy decisions are all about maximising benefits and minimising harms. I think these handful of unfortunate people should receive all the help they need to create an aadhar. But the fact that they hadnt as of 2019 received that help doesnt mean we shouldnt have some system of checking where public money goes.

Here is an actual survey of 1,67,000 households across india :https://policyinsights.in/research/explore-the-highlights-from-state-of-aadhaar-2019s-pulse-and-in-depth-surveys/

Highlights cause I know you dont read links: 95% of adults have Aadhaar, and on an average use it once a month; 75% of children have Aadhaar;

49% of people used Aadhaar to access one or more services for the very first time (e.g., ration, MGNREGS, social pensions, SIM cards, and/or bank accounts)

80% of beneficiaries feel Aadhaar has made PDS rations, MGNREGS and social pensions more reliable

0.8% of people experienced exclusion due to Aadhaar-related reasons from a key welfare service (PDS, MGNREGS, social pensions) which they had earlier received. (Our survey also found that 3.3% of people experienced exclusion because of non-Aadhaar related problems from a key welfare service which they had earlier received) 1% of MGNREGS job card holders did not get work the last time they tried due to Aadhaar-related reasons (compared to 31% due to non-Aadhaar related reasons)

0.5% of social pension beneficiaries did not receive their pension the last time they expected it due to problems with Aadhaar (compared to 5.7% who did not receive it due to non-Aadhaar related reasons and many more who could not identify a reason)

1.5% of PDS users experienced a biometric authentication failure and did not receive ration in their last attempt. However, 3.2% of PDS users received their rations despite biometric authentication failure.

ID Insight, Dalberg and Omidyar have done annual surveys across different states that provide hard data about the impact of aadhar. Go read them.

Dont believe Dalberg, Omidyar and ID Insight ?

Here is centre for global development surveying 633 households in rural and urban rajasthan https://www.cgdev.org/publication/what-a-new-survey-aadhaar-users-can-tell-us-about-digital-reforms-initial-insights

They found aadhar improved delivery of services, increased financial inclusion of poor people and women.

Is my argument that there are no problems with aadhar? of course not. I know many people who have fake aadhar IDs so its not doing all it can to prevent graft. There are undoubtedly people who slip through cracks and overzealous officials who make aadhar mandatory when it explicitly shouldnt be. but on the whole has aadhar been a good thing? I have large scale surveys from one group of people saying it largely works and saves the government a ton of money. and I have individual case studies on the other hand and theoretical arguments by your Reetika Khera and Jean Dreze and others. I know which one is more generalisable. I also know how hard it is to fake data for a lakh odd people in a survey.

Do we have to be vigilant about whether our aadhar data is secure? yes. Do we need to do more- yes. Is aadhar a massive conspiracy to spy on political dissidents and opponents- hate to break it to you but that was already happening long before aadhar, and introduction of aadhar has not increased surveillance in any measureable way. On the whole- is aadhar a good thing for poor people- very likely yes.

You say you care about poor people- why did you not bother looking it up at all?

This argument is not satisfactory. All systems are imperfect, even more so when designed for the first time. Aadhaar is no exception. But imperfection of design cannot be the sole condition for evaluating a system since no system can satisfy the condition of perfectibility. Your argument is acceptable only if it can be shown that UIDAI and other government agencies have, over time, not measurably improved their systemic capacities to apply Aadhaar without unfairly excluding legitimate beneficiaries under PDS.

You used all the buzzwords, "privilege" "excluded" "starving", must feel nice about yourself now? Or did you pick it up from your echo chamber? Point at one large scale survey that has captured these systemic deficiencies and not these one off incidents that are bound to happen with a 1.5 billion population

Honestly I’m so done with people who hate on vidhi. It just smacks of envy of the influence and access vidhi has. But you’re not gonna get influence and access by being some ideological puritan. Why on earth should a duly elected government work with advocacy organisations that hate them ? Adult politics is all about working with people who disagree with you and finding common ground. Vidhi has done this very well. Name one policy space in India that has accomplished as much as vidhi!

It’s obviously without peer - and that comes from drafting policy documents and yes - sometimes telling a babu or a minister exactly what to say in a speech.

What hasn't it done? Argued for the death penalty, argued there is no right to privacy, created law that endangered the lives of poor people, produced papers that argue that protestors are terrorists. imagine if you gave it the same political power as Putin. He was also a chamcha before he became head of state.

There is nothing wrong in arguing for capital punishment. You may think so but thinking does not make it so.

“Protestors” who destroy public property and prevent citizens from exercising their fundamental right to speak and move freely are, in fact, violating law and basic decency. Their punishment is an acknowledgment of that. Nothing wrong in arguing that either.

Elevating the idea of privacy to the status of an indivisible virtue and a strict test of whether a society is democracy or not is hardly reasonable, especially in a country where the poor do not have the luxury to choose between privacy and nutrition or privacy and a good education.

the death penalty is a law on the books. there is no popular support for abolishing it in our country. Please find the right to privacy in the constitution. it simply does not exist. I want a right to privacy- but i think that we should get one by constitutional amendment- not judicial activism. what laws endangered the lives of poor people? what papers specifically have argued that all protestors are terrorists? please point me to this stuff.

Here you go: https://www.legallyindia.com/convos/topic/419079-switching-from-t3-law-firm-to-a-think-tank-policy-group#comment-422137

Dear BJP supporters, CPR was headed by Pratap Bhanu Mehta for years and he left after the persecution by the Modi government. It is only then that Yamini Aiyar took over and the witch-hunt got worse. Also, CPR had Bibek Debroy among its ranks, during UPA rule. That should be the job of a think tank. Hire critical and contrarian voiced irrespective of who is in power.

As for your defence of Vidhi and Arghya.. LOOOL. Please look at Vidhi’s activities and positions in the Modi years.

hey! hey there! please dont assume everyone who disagrees with you is a BJP supporter. I disagree with you about whether CPR was non partisan and I also disagree with you about hating vidhi. Have never voted bjp and likely never will. The fact that you cannot imagine someone who disagrees with you who you cannot pigeonhole is honestly a problem.
The job of a think tank is not to hire contrarian voices. Who told you that? how and why would anyone pay them to do that? you do realise think tanks have to raise money ? they have to do actual work with actual deliverables to keep their members paid? And that doesnt happen by hiring a bunch of contrarian voices who refuse to work with anyone and do adult politics.

The job of a policy organisation like vidhi is to create policy, approach issues with humility, confer with different stakeholder groups, liase with the government, think about the law and try and advocate for what they think is right- not necessarily act as an opposition party outside parliament.

A child once very sweetly (and in perfect seriousness) asked me, "Do lawyers fight and argue with each other outside court also? And if so, do they do it all the time?". She is grown-up now, but I wish she could read this page. I think all the comments here might give a helpful indication as to the answer to her question.