The Oxford English Dictionary’s 2017 Hindi Word of the Year was “Aadhaar,” which in Sanskrit means foundation. News of the linguists’ pronouncement, covered in the Times of India, did not even have to mention why, other than to say it’s a word that has attracted a great deal of attention. Its tens of thousands of readers already know why.
Today, most Indian citizens don’t read or write Sanskrit. For them, Aadhaar is a massive biometric database, generating unique identity codes for potentially greater than a billion Indian citizens. These non-secret 12-digit codes are verified against a colossal personal data store containing individuals’ photographs, fingerprints for both hands, and retinal scans for both eyes.
