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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 swagato.sarkar@gmail.com

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 terrorismand UID explores the technological possibility of the great convergence of these concerns.

Keywords: Aadhaar, UID, UIDAI, India, biometrics, authentication, security, governance, governmentality.

identification,

verification,

Page 2 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 eGovernance 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 Foucaults 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

From now onwards, I will be using UID and Aadhaar interchangeably. 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.
2

Page 3 Giorgio Agambens (2009:14) definition of (social) apparatus: the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behavio[u]rs, opinions, or discourses of living beings.

Foucault (1978, 2007) argues that the introduction of the concept of population (over sovereignty) brought about a decisive shift in the history of the function of the state and the politics in general. The mechanisms of power had profoundly transform[ed] to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them (Foucault 1978: 136). This new form of power is bio-power, and Foucault defines it as the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power (Foucault 2007:1); which brings life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and [make] knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life (Foucault 1978:143). This bio-power developed into two forms. The first one is the disciplinary power which operates on individual corporeal bodies and is concerned with the disciplining [of the body], the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls (ibid.:139 and passim)Foucault calls it anatomo-politics. The second is the regulatory power which focuses on the population as a wholethe species body, which is imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to varyFoucault calls it the biopolitics of population. This new mode of power therefore connects the corporeal body at the micro-level with the individual as a unit of population at the macro-level.

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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 persons 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. zo). 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

Page 5 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) states] 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 panopticismthe urgent desire to complete and centralise the states knowledge of its citizens. However, this administrative

Page 6 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

Page 7 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

Page 8 order to exercise freedom (Nikolas Rose cited by Lyon (2009:5)). If the identity of a person is an outcome of the subjects 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 subjectidentifiers [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 overdeterminations. 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 document 4, 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 not correspond 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.

Page 9 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

Page 10 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 Herschels 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 suspects 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 1024and only 1024possible combinations of loops and whorls. Since 1024 was the square of 32, a cabinet containing thirty two sets of thirty-two pigeon holes arranged

Page 11 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 nontransferable, something singular, i.e. ones 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 (residents name, address, gender, age, and name of

Page 12 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 individuals 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 teststhe 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,

Page 13 the UIDAI database matches with the information given by the organisation and therefore it is authenticated, or no, it does not match. The UIDAI will not provide any other information to the organisation seeking verification of an identity. One the other hand, the UIDAI will not know the organisations purpose of verification request, e.g., the UIDAI will not know how much money was withdrawn or deposited by the individual in the bank. The latter set of information will remain with the organisation.

The UIDAI will separate biometric information from demographic one, encrypt both the sets and distribute and store those on various servers, so that even if one server is hacked, one will not have access to the entire set of information on a particular person. The sole owner of the database would be UIDAI and no other government department will have access to the data sets.

The possibility of real-time identity verification is not solely dependent on a unique number, but when various departments of the government are connected to the same network and become interoperable. The databases of these departments have existed as disconnected silos, which [make] zeroing in on a definite identity for each citizen particularly difficult [] [and] [the] lack of a unique number has given space to plenty of phantoms (Nilekani 2008: 368). A network allows accessing, collation, coordination and comparison of intersectoral databases, as well as intra-sectoral databases. The possibility of authenticating and weeding out fake and duplicate identities and the claim of identifying benefit/identityfrauds depend crucially on this comparison.

Various government departments and institutions in India maintain databases on the population, but due to institutional jurisdiction and policy, or a lack of technology, these

Page 14 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 Aadhaars 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 UIDAI 5 wants to transcend the territorial fix of the earlier forms of identification documents or credentials which an individual could have 6: an attestation from an authority (e.g. a Gazetted Officers 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

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 (November 17, 2008) Nilekanis ideas for the future, accessed on 10 April 2011 at http://www.businessstandard.com/india/news/nilekani\s-ideas-forfuture/340440/.

Page 15 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.

Page 16 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 Indias (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 overhauledin 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 fairprice shop (FPS) when the person comes to draw her/his familys 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

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).

Page 17 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
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 will complicate the existing system, instead of improving it (see Khera 2011, 2010, and Dreze 2010).
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Page 18 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 presocialthe 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

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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Page 19 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 vectorscartographic, 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 bullet 13, 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 alleither 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
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 IBMs 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 coordinates, means that a population can be identified for displacement or deportation, and help in the reorganisation of a given territory.
12

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 marketit 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 suitedin fact foundationalin 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 UIDs 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 (ones 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 Indias 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 customers business, reasonableness of operations in the account in relation to the customers 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 (RBIs website 15).

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 NATGRID 16. It was conceived in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attack in November 2008 17. 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 suspects 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.

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.businessstandard.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-fornatgrid/articleshow/18732604.cms; accessed on 18 April 2013 18 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 (7 September 2012), http://www.indianexpress.com/news/in-first-speech-shinde-skips-nctc-natgrid/999076/0, accessed on 7 May 2013.

16

Page 24 As already mentioned, the NPR is similar to UIDs biometric database created by the Ministry of Home Affairs, but it contains 15 fields of demographic data (UID records only five). The NPR website 19 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 counterterrorism, anti-insurgency and border control to check identity of persons on the spot. (Singh 2013, n.p.)

Edward Snowdens revelations 21 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 20

http://ditnpr.nic.in/Aboutus.aspx., accessed on 8 April 2013. 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 25 will be much easier for it to map the collected (meta-)data on an individual, making him or her legible to the state and therefore make the person extremely vulnerable.

The NATGRID, NPR and UIDAIs Central ID Data Repository (CIDR) bring together agencies with three sets of concerns: security and intelligence, social security, and financial regulation and verification of customers. This convergence paradoxically centralises and strengthens the states power to intervene 22, yet provides scopes for non-state agencies to have a lateral access to the state.

Lateral access to the state and commodification of data

The literature on network, particularly those inspired by Manuel Castells (1999), pits the network against sovereignty, and thereby sees an emancipatory possibility in the network. ITenabled network structures have contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, because of the ease of centralisation and monitoring, it can perfectly superimpose on the existing structures of authority. On the other hand, this system can be decentralised as well, and is vulnerable to anarchic attacks and disruptions. But here is a situation where the state (the sovereign power) constructs and controls the network, yet it opens up the infrastructure to private commercial interests.

The Report of the Technology Advisory Group for Unique Projects (TAG-UP) (Ministry of Finance 2011) recommends that the government should move away from in-house management of smaller projects and outsource to Managed Service Providers (MSP) or vendors, and for larger projects to a National Information Utility (NIU) framework. The

22

For a critique of UID from a surveillance standpoint, see Ramanathan (2010).

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 privatelygenerated 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 consumera 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 exclusion 23.

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 biometricsbe 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 states 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 protocolgoverned 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 ones 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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