Yes, we need privacy protection. No, it’s not just about Aadhaar
The pro-privacy debate has become an anti-Aadhaar stance. Are we missing the forest for the trees?
N S Ramnath
Senior Editor
Founding Fuel
NS Ramnath is a member of the founding team & Lead - Newsroom Innovation at Founding Fuel, and co-author of the book, The Aadhaar Effect. His main interests lie in technology, business, society, and how they interact and influence each other. He writes a regular column on disruptive technologies, and takes regular stock of key news and perspectives from across the world.
Ram, as everybody calls him, experiments with newer story-telling formats, tailored for the smartphone and social media as well, the outcomes of which he shares with everybody on the team. It then becomes part of a knowledge repository at Founding Fuel and is continuously used to implement and experiment with content formats across all platforms.
He is also involved with data analysis and visualisation at a startup, How India Lives.
Prior to Founding Fuel, Ramnath was with Forbes India and Economic Times as a business journalist. He has also written for The Hindu, Quartz and Scroll. He has degrees in economics and financial management from Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning.
He tweets at @rmnth and spends his spare time reading on philosophy.
My contributions
160 articles written
The importance of being anonymous
A minor subplot in the grand narrative of Aadhaar has raised important questions about privacy
The Aadhaar debate: Is common ground possible?
Discussions on Aadhaar often descend into shouting matches. One way to make progress is to break it down into smaller bits to understand the nuances
The Sceptical Optimist: A philosopher’s take on technological progress
In this interview Nicholas Agar, author of ‘The Sceptical Optimist’, talks about why unquestioning enthusiasm and a blanket rejection of technological change are equally misguided
How Uganda fixed leakages with transparency, and why it matters to India
India’s subsidy system needs reform, but the lack of information from the ground undermines the state’s ability to design right policies. Aadhaar promises that information and transparency
Midday meals and Aadhaar: The debate reveals how to make the system robust
Look closer at the debate and you’ll see takeaways to strengthen the system
This week in disruptive tech—March 7, 2017
A roundup of news and perspective on disruptive technology from around the world. In this issue: Facebook’s algorithm to spot suicidal tendencies, Elon Musk’s moon mission and blockchains
What to do about artificial intelligence
Make it work for the poor, two tech leaders say
Gigerenzer’s simple rules
Why simple rules of thumb often outperform complex models
Three Aadhaar-related budget announcements that you should take note of
The push to BHIM, Aadhaar Pay and formal credit to micro entrepreneurs