In this page, we show the aspect coverage of various ICTD policies, and the coverage and sentiment slant of various highly covered entities in mass media, related to coverage given to Aadhaar.
Aspects are subtopics of discussion within a given policy. We use topic modelling methods to uncover the aspects discussed in the mass media about each of the policies being investigated. We compute the mean relative aspect coverage across all of the seven news-sources that we consider. This helps us see what kind of aspects the mass media prefers to highlight or ignore.
For Aadhaar, the aspect [Aadhaar enrollment centers] has the maximum mean relative coverage, indicative of the mass media’s push towards informing citizens about the enrollment centers (especially in cities). This aspect discusses the operational and procedural details of the policy implementation, like the problems at enrollment centers (long queues, issues with documents produced by the people, understaffed enrollment centers), and the different phases in which the enrollment was carried out. The aspect [Court cases related to Aadhaar], which covers cases on privacy issues of Aadhaar data, and its applicability to public services, has the second largest coverage. These aspects are relevant to the consumer middle class, which is the dominant media audience anyway. However, we do not find a significant coverage provided to the issues directly relevant to the poor (for example, problems with public distribution system and other benefits due to malfunctioning Aadhaar linkage) . Our analysis thus shows that in Aadhaar, the mass media primarily covers the middle class, but aspects that directly impact the poor are clearly neglected. This is obvious to an extent as the middle class constitutes the primary audience of mass media. Among some of the highest covered aspecyts [Implementation of DBT] is the only aspect that covers the problems related to implementation of direct benefit transfer scheme, which directly impact both the middle class and the poor. However, other pertinent issues like problems of malfunctioning Aadhaar linkage causing troubles to the poor especially in accessing ration from the public distribution system is neglected.
By ‘entities’, we refer to people like politicians, business persons (directors or managers of companies), judiciary members, IAS officers, social activists, etc. that are covered by mass media with respect to a policy. Two of the important aspects of understanding the political economy around policies are: (a) which entities are the most vocal on policy issues in mass media, and (b) how do these entities speak on the policies. We try to answer these two research questions in this page.
The above figure shows the coverage provided to the top 20 highest covered entities in mass media.
Aadhaar sees the coverage of non-politicians like D.Y. Chandrachud, K.K. Venugopal, A.K. Sikri, and Rakesh Dwivedi, who are all judiciary members of the Supreme Court of India, which can be explained by the fact that a lot of debates took place in the judiciary around the Aadhaar policy, although it revolved around the constitutional legitimacy of the policy. We also find the presence of Ajay Bhushan Pandey, a bureaucrat in Aadhaar and currently the CEO of UIDAI, and Nandan Nilekani, a business-person and the proponent of Aadhaar. The only social development expert getting mentioned among the top 20 entities in mass media is Jean Dreze, who has been vocal against the policy on the failure of Aadhaar implementation leading to denial of ration to the poor
Overall, we can see that most of the top 20 highest covered entities are politicians. This is followed by business people, bureaucrats (IAS officers), and judiciary members. Academicians and social development experts from the civil society (including social activists and researchers documenting successes and failures of these policies) are provided negligible coverage by mass media. Thus, the coverage provided to policies in mass media mostly belongs to the politicians, and the blame games that they indulge in. In case of Aadhaar, this is followed by judiciary members as there were several court cases around data privacy, which connected to the middle class readership of the mass media. Finally, we also see a corporate alignment in the policy coverage. However, several academicians and social activists who raised their voice against the faulty implementation of the policy, and the problems caused to the poor thereby do not receive sufficient coverage in mainstream media.
In this figure, we see how the highest covered entities (politicians, business persons, IAS officers, judiciary members, etc.) speak on a particular policy. We look at the sentiment slant of the statements made by them on the policy. The green coloured bars denote an aggregate positive sentiment, and the red coloured bars denote an aggregate negative sentiment.
We can see an expected trend from this plot the ruling party members (politicians) who are instrumental in the formulation and implementation of a policy speak positively on the policy, whereas the opposition members are either less positive (in cases where the policy was ideated when they were in power) or negative on the policy. One of the most interesting observations is that although the business persons get much less coverage in mass media compared to the politicians, they generally speak positively about the policies. Nandan Nilekani spoke most positively about Aadhaar, which is expected as he was the chairman of UIDAI (the organization that issues Aadhaar numbers to citizens) and the founder of Aadhaar project. The negative stance of academicians like Jean Dreze can be attributed to issues raised by him of starvation leading to deaths, which originated from a denial of food grains in the PDS system from a malfunctioning Aadhaar linkage of the beneficiary family.
An example of a statement with positive sentiment: “Arun Jaitley during the discussion in the Rajya Sabha on the Aadhaar bill claimed that a sum of Rs. 14672 crores were saved in LPG subsidy for the year 2014-15 under the Direct Benefits Transfer scheme.”
An example of a statement with negative sentiment: “ This is pointless, and also a violation of the act, since every rural household is entitled to apply for a job card whether they use it or not. This is what seems to be happening with the Aadhaar-based biometric card authentication which the economist Jean Dreze says is being pushed relentlessly by the central government. “