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8/13/2019 The Unique Identity (UID) Project and Re-Imagining Governance in India
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The Unique Identity (UID) Project and Re-imagining Governance in India
(forthcoming in Oxford Development Studies)
Swagato Sarkar
Jindal School of Government and Public Policy
Abstract:
At various points in its career, the Indian state has deployed technologies to govern the
nation. Recently the state has undertaken a number of large scale projects to install digital
technology. The most controversial of these is the Unique Identity Project, which is
registering the biometric, along with demographic, information of the residents. In this paper, I will try to understand what is politically at stake in this technological intervention. I
would like to explore the political logics of biometric system and its consequences. I will
argue that UID re-imagines the economy and the state-citizen relationship as a series of
transactions. Theoretically, the main thrust of this paper is to understand the “general
economy of power”, as Michel Foucault calls it, which is unfolding in India around the
issues of capitalist growth, inequality, social protection, and terrorism—and UID explores
the technological possibility of the great convergence of these concerns.
Keywords: Aadhaar, UID, UIDAI, India, biometrics, identification, verification,
authentication, security, governance, governmentality.
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The Unique Identity (UID) project of the Government of India is an ongoing project which is
capturing the biometric images of the residents of the country along with a thin set of
demographic information to create a national database. Everyone enrolled in this project will
be given a unique online identity, which is a 12-digit number. The official name of the project
is Aadhaar 1, which means foundation in many Indian languages, and it indeed proposes to
play a foundational role in the restructuring and functioning of the government.
The Unique Identity (henceforth, UID) project has its origin in the National e-Governance
Plan (NeGP) adopted by the Government of India in May 2006 2. The NeGP is purported to
offer “a seamless view of Government” through the interoperability 3 of various e-
Governance applications (DoIT 2011:11). The NeGP has conceived 31 Mission Mode
Projects (henceforth, MMPs) which are “high priority citizen services”, offered by various
government departments (like income-tax, company affairs, pension, passport, etc.). These
services will be delivered in electronic mode to the doorstep of the citizens. The National
Resident/Citizen Database and UID are two such MMPs.
In this paper, I would argue that the biometric identity and the possibility of interoperability
signal a definite shift in the governmental rationality (i.e. governmentality) in India. I would
try to explicate the logics of this emerging technology-mediated governance structure by
drawing from Michel Foucault’s work on bio-politics. I will argue that we are witnessing the
institutionalisation of a particular type of social apparatus or dispositif of bio-politics, which
helps the state and the market to access an individual in an unprecedented manner. I follow
1 From now onwards, I will be using UID and Aadhaar interchangeably.
2 “The concept of unique identification was first discussed and worked upon since 2006 when administrative
approval for the project –“Unique ID for BPL families” was given on March 3rd, 2006 by the Department of
Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology” (UIDAI 2010b: 6). 3 Interoperability denotes the ability of various (primarily electronic) systems to communicate and exchange
with each other.
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Various techniques were developed to subjugate the body and control the population
(Foucault 1978:140). To become operational, this “power has to qualify, measure, appraise,
and hierarchize” (ibid.:146). It undertakes projects to map, categorise and know the
population and territory. The technologies deployed for such a task were mostly cartography
(creating maps of territory and “resources” like forests, rivers, etc.), ethnography (classifying
people into ‘tribes’, ‘castes’ based on cultural and social attributes) and demography (census,
national sample survey, etc. recording the names, physical attributes, territorial coordinates).
It is an epistemological drive informed by the Cartesian posit(ion)ing of a subject. Parallel to
this, there have been various attempts to record the physical characteristics of a person’s body
to uniquely identify him or her (like thumb imprint, size of the cranium, etc.). These were the
early practices of biometrics and anthropometry, many of which were part of eugenics and
racial profiling experiments conducted mostly in the colonised world (Maguire 2009, and
Caplan and Torpey 2001).
The hegemonic operation of power depends upon the creation and operation of “a series of
governmental apparatuses, […and] to the development of a series of knowledges” (Foucault
2007:108, emphasis in original). Within the architectonic of bio-power, and especially
through its connection of the micro- and the macro- politics, there is a tension between the
possibility of historical inscription of the individual body and identity, which creates memory
and archive and therefore coalesce the individual body into the larger political community
(i.e. bios or politically qualified life), and the physical body in its natural existence (i.e. zoē ).
This tension is manifested throughout the career of biometric governmentality as it
continuously strives to isolate the physical body from its historical and political existence. It
is more evident in the processes of institutionalisation of apparatuses where it faces both the
epistemic limit and the political challenges from within, which together creates what we may
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call the “anxiety of governance”: the presence of duplicate, fake and phantom identities
which makes the population opaque and indeterminate; and wastage, corruption and leakages
which make the system inefficient. For example, in the public distribution system, there are
leakages from the supply chain and diversion of ration to the open market and the presence of
phantom and duplicate ration cards further amplify the problem (DoIT 2011:78). The
solution is sought in creating better conditions for visibility, legibility, monitoring and
tracking of people and things circulating within the governance system.
This visibility and legibility cannot be partial as that would defeat the purpose of gaining
control over the circulation of people and things. Benedict Anderson (2006:189) calls this
insistence on making all people and things visible as “total surveyability”; an “[aspiration] to
create, under its [the (colonial) state’s] control, a human landscape of perfect visibility; the
condition of this “visibility” was that everyone, everything, had (as it were) a serial number.”
The recent advancement in the processing power of computers and computation of ‘big data’
(McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2012), the scope for scaling up IT infrastructure and data storage,
and digital communication systems to map, categorise, tag and track people have
reinvigorated the project of “total surveyability.” The chief architect of UID, Nandan
Nilekani (2008:370, emphasis added), writes, “A national smart ID [..] could [..] be
transformational. Acknowledging the existence of every single citizen, for instance,
automatically compels the state to improve the quality of services, and immediately gives the
citizen better access.” Referring to a similar South African biometric identification project,
Keith Breckenridge (2005:271) comments, “Computerised biometrics, like its paper-based
predecessors, is driven by the fantasy of administrative panopticism—the urgent desire to
complete and centralise the state’s knowledge of its citizens.” However, this administrative
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desire needs to be taken seriously as it is not only helping the state to “[reinvent] its
sovereignty” (Maringanti 2009:39), but also driving the restructuring of the government.
The concerns of biometric database: security/welfare and citizen/resident
The new ‘total surveyability’ projects are attempting to reconcile the objectives of ‘security’
and ‘citizen services’ [including welfare benefits], but struggling to determine the
constitutional status of the persons to be enrolled in the database.
The legal ground for conceptualising the National Resident/Citizen Database and UID MMPs
was created by the amendment of the Citizens’ Act of 1955 in 2004, whereby a new clause—
14A, was introduced. This clause stipulates that “[t]he Central Government may
compulsorily register every citizen of India and issue [a] national identity card to him [sic]”
and that “[t]he Central Government may maintain a National Register of Indian Citizens and
for that purpose establish a National Registration Authority” (DoIT 2011:70, and passim;
emphasis added).
The Multi-purpose National Identity Card (MNIC) project was the precursor to the UID. This
card was supposed to be a part of the planned National Security System, which would help to
identify, inter alia, the illegal immigrants. An MNIC pilot project was launched on April
2003 and the experience gathered from this project made it clear that the “determination of
Citizenship was a complicated and involved issue” (DoIT 2011: 71, emphasis added).
Instead of using the category of citizen, the state decided that “all the usual residents in the
country” would be registered to create “a biometrics based identity database” (DoIT 2011: 71
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and passim) called the National Population Register (NPR). This database would “become a
robust source of authentic real time data which would help in better targeting of the
benefits and services under various Government schemes/programmes, improve
infrastructural planning, would provide a fillip to strengthen security of the country and
prevent identity fraud.”
But the simultaneous existence of NPR and UID was unnecessary as both will contain the
same biometric information of a person in their databases. So to avoid duplication of effort
and database, an Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) was formed “ to collate the two
schemes…. [It] recommended that the Unique Identification Authority of India
(henceforth, UIDAI) be notified as an executive authority and anchored in the Planning
Commission to own, manage and operate the UID database” (DoIT 2011:72). Arguably, the
reason for anchoring the UIDAI in the Planning Commission was that this database would
become an important tool for the planners as “the count of people residing in an area would
be known at any point of time” (ibid.:73). On the other hand, the Knowledge Commission of
India felt that various modes of identification by the state [i.e. the various cards issued by the
state] need to be consolidated into one, which reinforced the idea of UID. The UIDAI was
formally constituted and notified on 28 January, 2009 (ibid.:78), with Nandan Nilekani as its
chairperson. It was obvious that the state wanted to project the biometric identification
system as beneficial to people and downplay the security imperative.
The problematic of identification
The UID brings the problematic of identification to the fore, the problem of ‘who am I?’ to be
established before an authority. The state requires us to “prove [our] legitimate identity in
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order to exercise freedom” (Nikolas Rose cited by Lyon (2009:5)). If the identity of a person
is an outcome of the subject’s agency and historical contestation and negotiation (see below
for elaboration), then the state reduces that play of difference to certain identifiers through
which it recognises the person as a legitimate subject—“‘identifiers’ [are] used for
‘identification’ and are at best proxies for [social] ‘identity’” (Lyon 2009: 9). The history of
identification is the history of contestation between the state and the subject/populist politics
over the fluidity of social identities and the stability of identifiers, and their over-
determinations. In this historical trajectory, at a given point of time, the state accepts certain
identifiers to create the formal identities (IDs), which “constitute a data shadow that enables
the efficient production of everyday life for permissible persons” (Wortman 2009:6).
The identification of an identity by “legal names, locations, tokens, pseudonyms, and so on”
has emerged during the “course of modern history” (Mordini and Massari 2008:488). The
mediaeval and pre-colonial India practised “ phatuk bundee” [gate-checking] form of
policing. “[To] access a town, especially at night, one would enter through a phatuk (gate)
and the chowkeydar [‘watchman’ (sic)] would allow and disallow entry, depending on
whether one carried the necessary tokens of identification” (Mehmood 2006:60-61). In
contemporary India, there are various identification documents like the ration card, passport,
driving licence, voter identity card, etc. This identification system requires the fidelity and
integrity of the document4, both of which are susceptible to pirate technologies which can
reproduce fake documents, and populist politics which can help illegitimate candidates to
obtain these documents (e.g. political parties can get the illegal immigrants ration card) and
become legitimate subjects. There was a problem at the front end where the document
4 Cf. Manovich (2013: 34, emphases in original) for a reverse process in case of digital media: “although some
static documents may be involved, the final media experience constructed by software usually does notcorrespond to any single static document stored in some media.” The fidelity of UID and its singular experience
therefore must be backed by the state authority, even when it is open to distortion and duplication.
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presented before an authority could be a forged one, and at the back-end, the official database
could contain both phantom and fake identities and illegitimate-converted-into-legitimate
subjects by politics. Homi Bhabha (1985:147) refers to this populist phenomenon as “an
Entstellung, a process of displacement, distortion, dislocation, repetition.” For this, the
technocrats and administrators distrust the populist politics and are always on the search for a
better technological solution which can create a database of truly singular identity.
The British colonialists created an extensive system of identification and strove to find a
unique bodily feature to mark and identify an individual. To reduce the “chaotic diversity” of
the Indian society, they tried to create “an orderly system of names and identities”
(Sengoopta 2006: 43). The information collected during various governmental exercises often
became permanent “once they [were] entered into a register, which [became] an archive of
alphanumeric data. [..] On the one hand, this data [quantified] the muddle of lived reality into
easily manageable digits; on the other hand, it [minimised] the need for utilising intimate
knowledge and trust in order to govern a territory” (Mehmood 2006:60). The colonial
governors were keen to “stabilize social hierarchies and verify social antecedents” so as “to
tax and police the population” (Singha 2000:152 and passim). The colonial subjects were
often found “to conceal or misrepresent their ‘true’ identity [which] undermined
administrative imperatives grounded in the idea of distinct collectivities with their special
characteristics.”
As “the flow of commodities from the peasant household and [..] supply of cheap labour to
certain channels” became vital for the functioning of the colonial economy and its integration
in the international market, “[the] principle of contract seemed to offer one way of
stabilizing” that flow (Singha 2000:155). The procedure for entering into a contract required
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the colonial subjects to verify their identity, who were duplicitous in character (Sengoopta
2006:42). The Indian society, on the other hand, had the proclivity “to accept identities at
face value without sufficient scrutiny” (Singha 2000:154).
In 1858, a junior civil servant in Bengal, William Herschel, asked a contractor to put his
palm-print on the contract document. His intention apparently was to intimidate the
contractor, but he soon realised that ridge patterns of the palm and fingers were unique to
every individual. “He never encountered a duplicate print, and confirmed that in prints taken
repeatedly from the same person across time, the individual ridge patterns persisted
unaltered” (Sengoopta 2006:41-42). He started advocating for the adoption of fingerprint as
an administrative tool, which could prevent “fraud, forgery and perjury [..] [which was]
undermining civil justice” (Singha 2000: 176). But Herschel’s plea was ignored.
Meanwhile in Europe, Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon were immersed in conducting
experiments to create a “science of fingerprinting.” Yet they could not find a scheme to
classify the unique patterns of the ridge, which “would be rational and reliable, as well as
easily searchable, by ordinary police officers. In order to use fingerprints as a tool of
detection, one needed a system that would allow the comparison of a suspect’s fingerprints
with those on record” (Sengoopta 2006:42). In 1897, the Inspector-General of the Bengal
Police, Edward Richard Henry, assisted by two Indian sub-inspectors, Azizul Haque and
Hem Chandra Bose, solved this problem by developing a classificatory system: “if one
divided all fingerprint patterns into two basic categories of loop and whorl, then for ten digits,
there were 1024—and only 1024—possible combinations of loops and whorls. Since 1024
was the square of 32, a cabinet containing thirty two sets of thirty-two pigeon holes arranged
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horizontally would provide locations for all possible combinations” (ibid.:43). Fingerprints
thereafter became a ubiquitous administrative tool (Mehmood 2006: 58; Singha 2000:182).
The experiments in the British India laid the foundation of modern biometric identification
system by creating a metric and an algorithm. The discovery of fingerprints as a unique and
stable parameter of identification found within the body helped to create a standardised unit
of measurement, i.e. a metric. A metric should “[satisfy] at least four basic requirements: 1)
collectability (the element can be measured); 2) universality (the element exists in all
persons); 3) unicity (the element must be distinctive to each person); [and] 4) permanence
(the property of the element remains permanent over time)” (Mordini and Massari 2008:489).
This metric can be used to generate an access code that stands for who one is; something non-
transferable, something singular, i.e. one’s own body (Fuller 2003). This access code can
override or complement photo- or electronic- ID-cards or passwords [in the industry parlance
it is: who you are (biometric), what you have (ID-card) and what you know (password)]. This
became the premise of creating a unique and ‘permanent’ biometric identity. When a
systematic (i.e. an algorithm for) sorting and retrieving mechanismwas developed it became
an administrative tool. The Aadhaar workflow is based on a similar and sophisticated metric
and algorithm.
The Aadhaar workflow, network and the question of interoperability
The UID project has three parts: enrolment, de-duplication and verification. In various parts
of the country, UIDAI has started enrolment camps, often run by private agencies, to
‘capture’ biometric information (facial photograph, two iris scans, and ten fingerprints) and a
set of demographic information (resident’s name, address, gender, age, and name of
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parent/guardian if the resident is below 5 years of age). After enrolment, the encrypted data is
sent or transmitted online to the UIDAI headquarters in New Delhi in a secured manner,
where the quality of the captured data is checked and a particular individual’s identity is
verified following a 1:n matching, i.e. one individual is checked against the available
database of the (entire) population called the Central ID Data Repository (henceforth, CIDR).
This is the de-duplication process. If the information captured from the person does not
match with the existing ones, then the person is considered to be unique and an Aadhaar
number is issued. The Aadhaar number is sent by post to the address furnished by the person
during the enrolment, which in turn verifies the given address. The Aadhaar number thereby
purports to be the sufficient proof of identity and address. The residents should be able to
furnish the Aadhaar number for verifying and authenticating their identity to obtain a service,
without producing any additional document.
If an organisation requires the identity of a person to be authenticated and it accepts Aadhaar,
then the person in question can furnish his/her Aadhaar number. The organisation can ask the
person to furnish his/her demographic information as well and to take biometric tests—the
information and the level of security required for verification will be solely determined by the
organisation, not UIDAI. For example, for a smaller transaction, a bank can just ask for
verifying a thumb imprint; whereas for a very high amount, it can request to verify the full set
of biometric information. The captured information, along with the Aadhaar number, is sent
online to UIDAI. The UIDAI will do an automated 1:1 check of the given information with
the CIDR (which can be accessed through electronic networks by the organisations) to
authenticate the information in real-time. Analogically, it is like opening a drawer marked
with a particular Aadhaar number to check the content (i.e. information) inside the drawer.
The UIDAI would return back an answer to the query in the form of ‘Yes’, or ‘No’, i.e. yes,
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databases do not “talk to each other.” A network can offer the technical possibility for the
creation of a unitary system. The UID of each individual can “become the link number
between the sectoral databases” (DoIT 2011: 72, emphasis added) and thereby allow the
inter-sectoral databases to interact depending on the agreed norms and policy decisions. In
absence of government-wide interoperability, any department can compare their database
with Aadhaar’s to authenticate and verify the identities and thereby weed out the duplicate,
fake and phantom identities in their own database.
Aadhaar and the economy of identification
The UIDAI emphasises that Aadhaar can be verified from anywhere in the country, which
“gives individuals a universal, portable form of identification” (UIDAI 2010a: 4, emphasis
added). By bringing biometrics and network together, the UIDAI5 wants to transcend the
territorial fix of the earlier forms of identification documents or credentials which an
individual could have6: an attestation from an authority (e.g. a Gazetted Officer’s signature),
or affiliation to/registration with an institution (passport, ration- and voter ID- cards issued by
the particular ministries of the central government). The UIDAI understands territory as the
supra-space which the international boundary of the Indian nation-state curves out, i.e. the
space is conceived as a container. The population contained within this space does not need
to be settled and sedentarised, but can be mobile 7. The challenge, as perceived, is to design an
institutional structure which would allow the possibility of being mobile, i.e. a structure that
can govern both the domicile and the migrants. The UID seeks to dissolve the territorial
5 The fingerprinting verification is done by the Government; an individual does not get an identity certificate
based on the authenticated fingerprint.6 Thereby it problematises the domicile criterion. 7
One can also note the argument for a single national market in India, see The Business Standard (November17, 2008) ‘Nilekani’s ideas for the future’, accessed on 10 April 2011 at http://www.business-
standard.com/india/news/nilekani\s-ideas-forfuture/340440/.
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coordinates and only the body would remain in the public registers and to the individual;
“body returns as the foundation of the human” (Nayar 2012:17) and “one cannot ever be
disassociated from the database of the body” (ibid.: 19). Mobility in a mapped out space is
not an administrative problem as long as one matches with his or her “data double”, i.e. his or
her profile on CIDR. As a consequence, for example, the public distribution system (PDS,
which provides subsidised food ration) should no longer operate on a model of territorial
confinement, i.e. one need not be tied to one PDS/fair-price shop (FPS). The beneficiaries
should be able to take up ration from an FPS of their choice.
Foucault (2007:48-49) argues that the bio-power ensures “the possibility of movement,
change of place, and processes of circulation of both people and things” and thereby it
reframes the question of freedom. The UID supports such an imperative by not only
dissolving the territorial coordinates and redefining space, but also by reimaging the economy
and the state-citizen relation as a series of transactions.
In transactions, even before the legal or contractual obligations set in, there is a question of
trust between the transacting parties. In a face to face transaction the trust deficit and
information asymmetry is assumed not to be serious enough. But where transactions take
place between unknown people or involve many people or multiple agents, then trust deficit
and information asymmetry become significant issues. Authentication of one or both the
parties, and thereby verifying them and their standing, rights and entitlements, helps in
creating trust between two unknown individuals. Identification helps in establishing a person
by providing his or her background. The UIDAI finds a space in these transactions as a
reliable third party/authority, i.e. the state agency, which can authenticate and verify a person.
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The relationship between the state and the citizen is also seen as a form of transaction. It is
obfuscated by the mediation of intermediary institutions. For example, in the case of public
distribution system (PDS), there are various intermediaries in the supply chain from the Food
Corporation of India’s (FCI) warehouse to the fair-price shop. This chain ought to be made
transparent and the intermediaries should modifiable, transformable or removable. To address
the problem of coverage of beneficiaries and ascertaining their off-take, UIDAI wants the
design and infrastructure of welfare system like PDS to be overhauled—in its neologism,
“process re-engineered.” Since Aadhaar is a unique number given to every individual, and
telecommunications technology and network (including end-level portable/handheld devices)
can reach the beneficiary8, therefore, the delivery system needs to be thought in a bottom-up
way, starting with the beneficiary. The authentication of a beneficiary will be done at the fair-
price shop (FPS) when the person comes to draw her/his family’s ration. This would screen
out the ration drawn using fake and duplicate cards. This authenticated off-take by
beneficiaries becomes the record on the basis of which the government can supply resources
to that particular fair-price shop. The allocation becomes variable, linked to authentication
and choice of FPS by the beneficiary. This authentication is then followed up through the
supply chain and the allocated grain is tracked from the point of release by the FCI to its
arrival at the FPS. The beneficiaries, on the other hand, would receive an SMS intimation of
the amount of grain allocated to their FPS and when those should be available to them
(UIDAI 2010a). Therefore, the system tries to bridge the information asymmetry between the
FPS owner and the beneficiaries. An Aadhaar-based PDS can also allow the governments to
8 Nandan Nilekani emphasised the role of telecommunications, which will make the “UID data [..] accessible to
authenticating applications through telecom networks.” He told the delegates of a conference, “We are going to
create apps which will need connectivity: Our whole assumption is that these are online systems, mobile based – it assumes ubiquitous connectivity throughout the country. We are banking on the Telecom Industry to deliver
on the promise of connectivity” (Medianama 2009).
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supply ration to certain “targeted” individuals (e.g. nutritional supplements for pregnant
women), instead the whole household 9.
Concomitant to this “[p]rocess re-engineering in government” (Mann et al 2012, n.p.), there
is an increasing tendency to financialise the welfare system, an approach where Aadhaar is
supposed to be pivotal. The state is not only moving away from direct production, but also it
does not want to procure from the market. It is suggested that the state should not involve in
procuring welfare benefits like education, health, etc. directly from the market; but rather it
should offer cash or coupons (i.e. “direct cash transfers”) to the beneficiaries, who will obtain
these from a ‘supplier’ of their ‘choice’ in the competitive welfare market.
The policy initiatives like “financial inclusion” and “direct cash transfer” would inject
financial resources in the (rural) economy. This would all of a sudden bring a large number of
people to the financial market, either as recipients of cash from the government or as
consumers of newer financial commodities. In this market, the financial companies and
service providers will face a large number of unknown individuals and the conventional
model of paper trail would increase the transaction cost. This is where UID becomes
important: it establishes the identity of the person with whom a financial company would
deal; a “business correspondent” of the company can use a handheld electronic device
(microATM) to complete the transaction and record the necessary information. Second, cash
or coupons would be provided by the state to avail services like education and health, which
were hitherto “supplied” by the state, from the market. This market for education and health
would require means to connect the “beneficiaries” with the “service providers” or
9 Activists have vehemently opposed the inclusion of Aadhaar in the PDS and other welfare schemes like the
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) as an uninvited entity and an intruder
in the day-to-day functioning of social welfare programmes like the Public Distribution System and, which willcomplicate the existing system, instead of improving it (see Khera 2011, 2010, and Dreze 2010).
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“government-supported-entrepreneurs”10, to identify the beneficiary and authenticate his/her
entitlements. Again, Aadhaar becomes crucial in bridging the gap; it acts as a payment
bridge.11
The political ontology of Aadhaar
In these applications, the Aadhaar plays an infrastructural role which brings together various
apparatuses. It becomes possible because the Aadhaar is distinct from earlier forms of
identification system as it separates an ‘identity’ from the ‘application’ and the purpose of
such identification. For example, a passport is issued to enable travel across the border, a
ration card to draw subsidised food items, etc. But Aadhaar on its own has no use; it needs to
be used in conjunction with an application. This separation allows UIDAI to proclaim the
ideological neutrality of Aadhaar and dissociate itself from other surveillance-oriented
projects of the state, and dodge the normative and legal contentions that a politicised category
like ‘citizenship’ entails. Aadhaar presents itself as a technical solution to the problem of
uncertainties of identity which both the inter-departmental operations within the government
and the market transactions require.
By accepting the body of a resident as an empirical constant, Aadhaar makes an identity pre-
social—the sameness of a person remains intact at all times and in all circumstances (Cf.
Bennett et al 2005). As David Lyon (2001:291) argues, “the body itself can be directly
scrutinized and interrogated as a provider of [..] data.” The difference is absolute and the
entire Aadhaar workflow is geared towards overcoming contingency, contestation, and
10 A term used by Rajendra Pawar of NIIT while arguing in favour of coupon-based private education system at
the “ Next Generation Service Delivery-Enabled by Aadhaar ” conference, organised by NASSCOM in partnership with UIDAI on 22-23 June 2011 in Bangalore.11
For a favourable appraisal of Aadhaar-based cash transfers, see Roy Chaudhuri and Somanathan (2011).
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negotiation. The purported uniqueness is established by using the algorithmic techniques of
pattern matching which distinguishes one from another. It attempts to completely map out the
population of a given territory (hence, mapping residents, not citizens) and render it as a
rational and singular (no fakes and duplicates) and a legible space. It can further
accommodate various vectors—cartographic, ethnographic, demographic, etc.—each of
which can cross through the unique body, and thereby together can locate a particular body in
a given space. It becomes like a cross-hair 12: one becomes a target . Thereafter, whether one
becomes a target of a bullet13, or PDS rice, or some cash, it does not matter for the biometric
identification system.
Within a biometric system, the ethical foundation of recognition is reduced to moral
certainty, and creates a static norm governed system: a regime of standards and protocols.
The syntax and objective of identification depends on the intention of the programmer (e.g.
the state agencies) and how it is triangulated with other categories 14. The imperative is to
verify the bearer of entitlement and rights, and deny access to those who do not match. It
requires no participation from the subjects at all—either one is entitled or not, which has
already been established by the norm, i.e. one is disciplined by the norm. To paraphrase
Foucault (1978: 146), the UID “effects distributions [of people and things] around the norm.”
Therefore, on the face of it, a biometric system appears to be ideology-neutral (i.e. a norm
12 Gillian Fuller provides an interesting insight, “In a world of multidimensional movement, biometrics is
becoming the means by which the singularity of our bodies connect[s] quite literally into the networks where
our multiple selves reside. The individual bodily connects to her divided self through regulated networks of
power rather than as an individual “seeing herself” through representational metanarratives. What is important
for identity now is how the points come together in a scan. For instance, do ten points correctly correlate in an
iris scan? The individual in a biometric world is not “seen” as a whole body. The individual has no discernible
outline, it is seen in fragments – a pattern match of the eye. Thus the algorithmic logic of the database replaces
the linear logic of narrative and character development in the structural formation of the individual. In this sense
then the individual is a networked becoming rather than a Cartesian positioning.” (Fuller 2003, n.p, emphasis
added).13
Hence, the reference to IBM’s involvement with the Nazis in the Holocaust is made in connection with this
calculative logic (see Black 2002).14
But at the same, the very fact that a particular category can be triangulated with spatial and temporal co-ordinates, means that a population can be identified for displacement or deportation, and help in the re-
organisation of a given territory.
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governed system, which simply authenticates a person), yet it is very much ideology-driven
(i.e. it is part of making a selected population discernible and a target for policy objectives—
which Samuel Weber (2005) calls “the militarization of thinking”). This new will to power
articulates a desire for a procedural system, and attempts to convert risk into reassurance.
Through this procedural system, Aadhaar helps the formal capital to subsume the informal
and small capital in the market, but finds itself in a tense relationship with the logics of
populist politics in India.
In the informal economy, the transactions are generally of smaller amount and usually take
place either on a face-to-face basis or follow a social referral system, i.e. information is
sought from within the social network in selecting a customer or a business partner. The
transactions in the informal economy do not generally follow the principles of open market; it
is a closed network. The operation of this informal market therefore does not record and
create an archive of historical data about the functioning of the market—it remains opaque to
the formal capital (see below for further discussion on data as a commodity). Aadhaar will
help the organised (finance) capital to overcome this lack of knowledge by authenticating
hitherto anonymous identities in real-time and facilitate to scale up the transactions.
The populist politics in India, on the other hand, has emerged by politicising the identities
(like scheduled caste and tribe, ethnic, regional and religious monitories, poor, etc.) created
by the governmental practices of the state (Chatterjee 2004). This politics is concerned with
the reconfiguration of the ethics of recognition and redistribution. It enables the construction,
contestation and negotiation of identities by developing a play of differences. It involves the
role of contingency in confronting the Other, the need to acknowledge the singularity of the
Other, and to come in terms with the moral ambiguity involved in that process. Through
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these, the (political) identities emerge as meta-narratives of self, community and being (Fuller
2003).
The UIDAI attempts to reconcile with populist politics and at the same time try to appropriate
it within its efficiency-driven, protocol-based developmentalism. It claims that Aadhaar is
well suited—in fact ‘foundational’—in realising the objectives of the ‘Right to Food’ (UIDAI
2010a). It expects the rights-based approach to offer a norm of entitlement, present a
formalised subject of entitlement and generate the protocols of presenting and verifying the
subject for whom the state has assumed certain responsibilities. Thus the UID’s rationality
encroaches upon the political reason by placing or creating a demand for a singular, closed
(i.e. no play of differences) and final subject from political mediation. The biometric system
also shifts the onus of identification to the individual as one has to match with his or her
biometric data (one’s “data double”) available with the state (i.e. in the CIDR); whereas in
the earlier forms of identification, the state had to verify the authenticity of the documents
presented before it. To paraphrase David Lyon (2009:42), the Aadhaar number is “the visible
component but the power [..] lies in the registry database .”
The great convergence: security-growth-welfare
The UIDAI always projects the developmental (“beneficial”) applications of Aadhaar. But it
will be a mistake to study Aadhaar in isolation; rather it needs to be considered in conjugation
with other experimental governance projects like the Reserve Bank of India’s guidelines for
‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) process, the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) and the
National Population Register (NPR).
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Nilekani (2013) sketches a short genealogy of biometrics: first it started as a forensic tool; the
second phase started after 9/11 when it became a tool for surveillance, particularly of the
immigrants and potential terrorists; and then in the third phase, biometrics has become a
development tool like Aadhaar. However, this is a distorted genealogy and there is no clear
break in these ‘phases’ of evolution of biometrics. Biometrics remains directly a part of the
security discourse and apparatus. It is governed by the principle of suspicion and driven by a
desire to police. It adds surveillance capabilities like listening, monitoring, tracking,
recording and filtering to the technologies of regulation and control, and converts it into an
apparatus for capturing the digital footprint or traces of presence. Foucault (2007:25)
explains, “sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory, discipline is exercised on
the bodies of individuals, and security is exercised over a whole population.” The deployment
of digital biometrics and networks can bring about a convergence in all these three aspects of
governance: sovereignty, discipline and security.
The Reserve Bank of India has issued the Know Your Customer (KYC) guidelines to manage
risk and prevent money laundering, as it mentions:
[KYC] involves making reasonable efforts to determine true identity and beneficial
ownership of accounts, source of funds, the nature of customer’s business,
reasonableness of operations in the account in relation to the customer’s business, etc.
which in turn helps the banks to manage their risks prudently. The objective of the
KYC guidelines is to prevent banks being used, intentionally or unintentionally by
criminal elements for money laundering (RBI’s website15).
15 http://www.rbi.org.in/SCRIPTS/FAQView.aspx?Id=82, accessed on 8 April 2013.
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KYC is legally binding under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (PMLA),
which came into force on 1st July, 2005.
The Ministry of Home Affairs [the ministry for internal security in India] is setting up the
National Intelligence Grid or NATGRID16. It was conceived in the wake of the Mumbai
terrorist attack in November 200817. It will be a network of networks and
[eleven] “user” Central agencies will be able to electronically access 21 sensitive
databases, now held in several areas like banks, credit card, internet, cell phones,
immigration, motor vehicle departments, railways, National Crime Records Bureau,
SEBI and Income Tax Department. Along with the Crime and Criminal Tracking
Network System (CCTNS)18, which will integrate the Central and state crime data,
NATGRID will give a suspect’s “360 degree” profile (Balachandran 2011, n.p).
NATGRID is not an organisation but a tool which will allegedly help the state to combat
terrorism effectively. It will not “store” the data, but only facilitate its transfer; the data will
continue to be “owned” by the respective institutions and departments.
16
We are not interested in understanding the inter-ministerial tension over NATGRID and the debate over the budgetary allocation for the UID project. It has been widely reported that the Ministry of Defence and Ministry
of Finance “apparently think that if the [NATGRID] project comes into operation, the MHA [Ministry of Home
Affairs] would have uninterrupted access to all information under their jurisdiction,” The Business Standard (30
May 2011) and thereby become more powerful than the other ministries. http://www.business-
standard.com/article/companies/govt-extends-tenure-of-natgrid-chief-111053000192_1.html, accessed on 12
June 2012.17
Economic Times (28 Feb, 2013) ‘Budget 2013: 6-fold increase for NATGRID’
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/budget-2013-6-fold-increase-for-
natgrid/articleshow/18732604.cms; accessed on 18 April 201318
“Multi-Agency Centre, an intelligence sharing platform, and Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System
(CCTNS) that aims to integrate crime records at all the police stations in the country [..] [and the] National
Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) a proposed all-encompassing body to deal with terrorism”. These two
projects are on hold because of the strong opposition from the federal state governments, The Indian Express (7September 2012), http://www.indianexpress.com/news/in-first-speech-shinde-skips-nctc-natgrid/999076/0,
accessed on 7 May 2013.
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As already mentioned, the NPR is similar to UID’s biometric database created by the
Ministry of Home Affairs, but it contains 15 fields of demographic data (UID records only
five). The NPR website19 cites Clause 14A of the Citizens Act 1955, and claims that “it is
compulsory for all usual residents to register under the NPR.” The Minister of State in the
Ministry of Home Affairs, R.P.N. Singh (2013), informed the lower house of the Parliament
that NPR has taken special “measures to strengthen coastal security” and will issue “Resident
Identity (smart) Cards (RICs) to all usual resident of age 18 years and above in these [coastal]
villages.” The Ministry plans to eventually offer RICs to all the usual residents of India. The
RIC will bear the Aadhaar number on it; and will be a
Plastic Smart Card, which would not only be durable but also enable field
authentication of identity without dependence on any external media like internet on
mobile connectivity20. Given the security threat perception in the country, this Smart
Identity Card would greatly enhance the capability of agencies involved in counter-
terrorism, anti-insurgency and border control to check identity of persons on the spot.
(Singh 2013, n.p.)
Edward Snowden’s revelations21 of the activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) of
the USA demonstrate the pervasive capability of modern surveillance technologies to gather
information on an unprecedented scale. The NSA often gathered information on targeted
individuals or organisations, but it mostly collected a vast amount of generic information
from various sources. Most of this information was sorted based on the metadata it contained.
If an NSA-like organisation has access to an authenticated online biometric database, then it
19
http://ditnpr.nic.in/Aboutus.aspx., accessed on 8 April 2013.20 One can see a difference of opinion within the state on the extent to which it can rely on online IT systems.
21 www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files, accessed on 2 November 2013.
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government would formulate the policy and enforce it, while the NIU would implement the
IT systems; the government would retain the strategic control (ibid.:11). The relationship
between the government and NIU would be contractual and that of a partnership. The NIU
would be autonomous, profit making institutions, but not necessarily profit maximising.
Therefore, an NIU would be registered as a company. It recommends that every ‘Mission
Team’ should be able to hire people from outside the government on a contractual basis.
The TAG-UP report stresses that the company structure of NIU will give it, among other
things, the ability to “raise funds and it allows for financial independence” (ibid.:13). Though
it does not inform us how an NIU will raise funds, but perhaps the clue lies in its emphasis on
‘data’. The report advocates the production of quality data. It suggests that
clean data can be ensured by standardisation of processes, matching and verifying
information in workflows, simple and well defined open data formats, electronic
payments and processing, instant feedback to customers, incentives for compliance,
and penalisation for non-compliance (ibid.: 37).
The data produced within and by these systems is a ‘public good’ and TAG-UP advocates
that the government should release data “in simple, well-defined, machine-readable formats”
(ibid.: 49). It explains,
Open data can become a foundation for a number of transformational IT projects in
Government. Innovative firms and individuals can combine various types of data to
glean new information that may not have been possible from the individual datasets.
[..] There is a need of a much greater scale of release of unencumbered data, placed
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into the public domain, of information created within Government. There can be
economic data, map data, census data, pollution data, water data, soil quality data,
climate data, PIN code data, administrative boundaries data, health data, Government
accounts data, etc., which is released by the relevant ministries. Early international
experiences of releasing open data using open file formats have resulted in mashups,
which combine data from multiple sources and present it in ways that yield new
insight , have been encouraging (ibid.:41, emphases added).
This is a clear advocacy that various forms data, produced and retained by the state, should be
made public, i.e. data should be available in the market as a commodity. It is quite obvious
that this data will fetch revenue to the exchequer; however, without assuming such a
commodity form, data will not be available to the competing firms. It is likely that new
companies will emerge which will collect, collate and repackage these data-sets. Therefore,
there is a real possibility that the government-generated data will converge with privately-
generated data. The “‘way forward’ [for such a convergence] is that there has to be at least
one unique variable that is common to each of the sets of personal information” (Higgs
2011:188, emphasis added). The UID can become that unique variable.
On the other hand, UID can allow “mapping between entries in [commercial] databases and
the actual, existing consumers” (Shukla 2010, p.33). Every time a company verifies an
identity through the Aadhaar platform, it also maps the information on its database to the
authenticated consumer—a tighter and powerful dataset can thus evolve. “Once this is in
place, the profiling data is validated and ready for use as a business resource such as
identifying and tracing defaulters, pursuing potentially new consumers and so on” (ibid.: 33)
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and such an “integrated pan-India database would work towards promoting India as an
accessible marketplace for banking, financial and other institutions” (ibid.:32).
Conclusion
The genealogy of UID shows that the Indian policymakers were persistently occupied with
the concern to create a national biometric database of the usual residents and the need for a
consolidated unique number and a card, even when inter-ministerial disagreement existed.
The UID was created through an executive order and still operates without any legal backing.
The federal state governments and central government have been compelling people to
register with the UIDAI to avail certain (welfare) benefits and as a necessary identification
document in official procedures (like registry of property in Delhi).
At the domestic level, the biometric system is justified in the name of improving welfare
system, and the international level, it appears as a solution to a “third world problem”, as
Mordini and Massari (2008: 497 and passim) declare, “Most developing countries have weak
and unreliable documents and the poorer people in these countries do not have even those
unreliable documents.” Both the sides claim to make the invisible visible, “give a face to the
multitude of faceless people who live in developing countries, contributing to turn these
anonymous, dispersed, powerless, crowds into the new global citizens.” It is beyond the remit
of this paper to study how ordinary people themselves have reacted to, and engaged with, the
UID enrolment, what role Aadhaar has found in their everyday lives and if it is creating new
forms of marginalisation and exclusion23.
23 For a critical perspective on such marginalisation and exclusion, see Rao (2013).
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In this paper, I focussed on the logics of UID and tried to show that from the colonial period,
the biometric projects were invested with two administrative desires: “total surveyability” of
the population and the “certainty” in establishing the identity of an individual. The individual
is the unit of governmentality and we have seen how the logic of suspicion about an
individual, that underlines policing, never leaves any application of biometrics—be it in
direct surveillance, welfare disbursal or in contract formation in the market. Fraudulent
activities, forgery and duplicity keep haunting the system, which in turn, fuel a new search
for a better and tighter identification regime. The result of such an approach is the
strengthening of the state’s authority and its capacity to track individuals.
The deployment of digital technologies in creating identification system has made accessing,
collating and comparing databases faster, easier and more accurate. This leads to the
possibility of centralisation of power and authority of the state. The very norm- and protocol-
governed nature of digital systems prioritises the efficiency-side of governance. Such an
approach can remain blind to the human agency and its capacity to negotiate technology, and
even subvert it. The logic of UID drawn from that of biometrics, therefore, stands at odds
with the logic of populist politics.
The norm-governed system and the speed with which data is processed over a network make
Aadhaar a system geared towards facilitating transactions and financial payments. Aadhaar
and other digital interventions create conditions where the private commercial organisations
can have access to the state-owned IT infrastructure, and more importantly, get various data
produced by the state. Aadhaar can become the unique variable that helps to map the
consumer on the private market data and also triangulate those with the governmental data to
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gain consumer and market insights. Through these moves, perhaps governmentality in India
has started to move beyond the institutional domain of the state.
When the political and political economic logics of UID are studied together, they point to
the consolidation and intensification of the authority of the state and the grip of the market,
especially the financial and service sectors. They point to the convergence of concerns and
imperatives of security, growth and welfare. Within this system, the individuals appear more
as a beneficiary or a consumer, than a citizen. The UIDAI claims that Aadhaar will make it
convenient for residents to prove their identity and address. However, such freedom is a
limited one, as the very the logic of suspicion, i.e. police, has invaded various spheres of life,
and the onus of proving one’s identity has been shifted from the state to the individual. A new
interpellative structure is being erected, where the authority exists before the individual, and
it positions the individual first as a subject, then a citizen.
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