The Unique Identity (UID) Project and Re-Imagining Governance in India

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

[email protected]

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.



Page 20

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



Page 21

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).



Page 22

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.



Page 23

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.



Page 24

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.





Page 26

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



Page 27

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)



Page 28

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).



Page 29

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



Page 30

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.



Page 31

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