India’s Documentation Gap, Rapido’s Fare Tricks And UPI In Court

A birth certificate is supposed to be a record of something that has already happened: that you were born. But for millions of people in India, not having that piece of paper can make it harder to prove who they are, claim citizenship, or access basic services.

This week, my colleague Archis Chowdhury, along with Dipanjan Sinha, reported how people are being asked to prove their citizenship with documents that, in many cases, the state itself failed to record. The report found that an estimated 13.21 crore births between 2000 and 2024 went unregistered.

The problem is not new. What is changing is what happens when an old documentation gap meets a new digital state. The report took me back to four-year-old Ruhi, whom I met while reporting in Jharkhand last year.

The private hospital where Ruhi was born had issued her family a birth record. But the government did not recognise it. 

Getting a government-issued one meant affidavits, witnesses, fees and months of bureaucracy. For her daily-wage-worker parents, this was not simply a paperwork problem. It had consequences for something much more basic: her access to food and education.

Because by the time I met her, welfare had become digital too. A birth certificate was needed to get an Aadhaar. Aadhaar was needed to enter the digital system tracking children receiving nutrition through Anganwadi centres.

“We never knew that choosing a private hospital for childbirth would decide so much about our children’s future,” Ruhi’s mother told me.

Across Bihar, Jharkhand and Karnataka, I found children and their families navigating a system where a missing document, a failed authentication or a face AI could not recognise meant disappearing from the system altogether.

Technology was meant to make welfare efficient, but resting on unequal access to documents, it is carrying old gaps into newer systems.

And that’s the space Decode Internet keeps returning to: where technology quietly changes how we live, work and access what we are entitled to. This newsletter brings together some of those stories every Tuesday, including the ones that make everyday tech a little harder to take for granted.

Here are five stories that caught my attention this week:

Your Private Conversations With ChatGPT Is Being Rated

Your ChatGPT conversation may feel like a private exchange with a machine. But a 404 Media investigation found contractors under OpenAI’s Project Lily reviewing real conversations and rating responses to improve the chatbot. While chats are anonymised, sensitive details can still reach reviewers. Users can opt out of model training or use Temporary Chat, but the episode is a reminder that an AI chat is not quite a private diary.

Rapido Fined For Nudging Users To Pay More 

Rapido has been fined Rs 10 lakh after the consumer regulator found its interface used “dark patterns” to push consumers towards higher fares. One prompt told users, “Higher the price, higher the chance of getting a ride”, while a colour-coded slider made paying more look like the safer choice. The Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union welcomed the move, calling for tipping to remain voluntary and transparent, and only after the ride.

The Cost Of “Free” UPI Payments Is Now In Court

A PIL in the Supreme Court is challenging the government’s move to introduce a 0.4% merchant discount rate on certain UPI transactions above Rs 2,000 from October 15. Customers will not be charged, but someone still has to pay for the infrastructure behind those “free” transactions. You can read Srikanth Lakshmanan’s explainer for Decode here. 

Before deciding who should pay, the costs of running UPI need to be publicly understood. Because “free to use” does not mean “free to run”.

Over 15 Crore In Death Benefits Went To Nominees Of Workers Still Alive 

In Odisha, an audit found 2,487 construction workers listed as dead who continued to use Aadhaar authentication to collect subsidised ration. In 753 cases, their nominees had already received Rs 15.10 crore in death benefits.

Aadhaar has become a gatekeeper to welfare entitlements across schemes, even as it repeatedly falters as an authentication and identification system. The case is another example of what happens when so much depends on a system that does not always get it right.

Your Next Pharmacy Visit Could Be On Camera 

The Health Ministry has proposed mandatory CCTV surveillance at pharmacies selling prescription drugs, with footage retained for three months. Chemists have raised concerns about the cost and patient privacy, pointing out that pharmacy visits can reveal sensitive information about reproductive, sexual, psychiatric and other health conditions. The proposal could turn something as private as buying medicine into another routinely recorded interaction.

In Case You Missed It

At Decode Internet this week, we followed stories of missing records, digital trails and the people caught in between.

India's Undocumented Are Paying For The State's Failure To Register Them
For millions without birth certificates, proving citizenship can mean reconstructing a paper trail the state failed to keep. (Read here)

Explained: What Anthropic's Text Watermark Could Mean For Privacy In India
Anthropic says its watermark only shows that Claude was involved. The privacy concern is what investigators might do with that lead. (Read here)

Decode This Week is your weekly guide to the technology changing how we live, work and navigate the world around us. From AI and algorithms to scams, surveillance, platforms and digital policy, we look beyond the hype to ask a simple question: what does this mean for you?

Until next week :)