How Andhra Pradesh Built India’s First Police State

VIJAYAWADA, Andhra Pradesh — Across the hall from Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu’s office in the Andhra Pradesh Secretariat is a windowless room with giant wall-sized screens that display the intimate personal details of 43 million of the state’s 50 million residents: GPS coordinates of their homes, the medicines they use, the food rations they eat, what they say about the Chief Minister on their social media accounts, real-time feeds of thousands of security cameras (with some cameras inside people’s homes – voluntarily, of course), their castes and sub-castes, their religion, their student scholarships and old-age pensions, their movement in every state ambulance, and of course — their Aadhaar numbers.

Welcome to the dawn of “Sunrise AP 2022” — Naidu’s ambitious, and unnerving, vision of a society governed entirely by a giant, searchable database, called “e-Pragati”, that integrates all the information, held by every government department, about every resident in AP using their e-KYC authenticated Aadhaar numbers.

This data can be instantly pulled up on the displays in control-room, opposite Naidu’s office, called the Real Time Governance Centre (RTGC). In here, a gaggle of geeks sit at about 40 terminals, ceaselessly monitoring government programmes in an attempt to improve efficiency, eliminate wastage, and ensure that every welfare programme targets its intended beneficiary.

Read more at  HuffPost India