India's welfare clean-up
Ghewar Ram and his wife Champa Devi stand outside their hut in India’s desert state of Rajasthan and hold up their Unique Identification (UID) cards.
The cards themselves might be small, but they are part of a huge government initiative to reduce corruption. They relate to a database known as Aadhaar, which enables direct cash transfers to the poor in an attempt to cut out frauds who skim billions of dollars from welfare schemes.
An enrolment centre for the UID database system stands in the scrubby landscape of Merta.
Villagers queue up to register with the database.
Fingerprint scans are taken from a local.
A villager gets ready to be photographed.
A woman has her fingerprints electronically registered.
Radha, a 75-year-old vegetable vendor, holds out her hands after a fingerprint scan.
Local women queue up to enrol.
A villager has her irises scanned.
A woman gets ready to have her picture taken.
Women crowd around to enrol in the system.
An operator sits at his desk as he helps to enter people into the database.
Aadhaar workers hunch over their computers.
