Becoming data: biometric IDs and the individual in ‘Digital India’

Abstract

Aadhaar (literally ‘foundation’) is the largest national biometric identification drive the world has witnessed. An Aadhaar is a twelve‐digit ID number linked to its holder's iris scans, fingerprints, facial photograph, and demographic information in a centralized database. In but a decade, India has expeditiously enrolled over 90 per cent of its billion‐strong population into a Central Identities Data Repository. This essay is an ethnographic consideration of the processes by which Aadhaar enrollees become data, focusing on the sociopolitical valence of biometric data. It argues that the datafication of the body via Aadhaar occasions re‐examinations of – and contestations over – the idea of the individual in postcolonial India, a country often deemed sociocentric in popular and scholarly discourse alike. Further, it suggests that biometric socialization facilitates belonging in a ‘Digital India’, often rendered as a data cosmopolis in emergent technocratic imaginations.

The Sociology of Personal Identification

“…Numbers must be disentangled and transcribed in nominal format so they can be linked in a flexible manner to the stock of existing and future physical houses. The same holds for personal names, birth records, and passports (McKeown 2008;Nair 2021;Scott 1998).…”

“…People and their lives do not come in the form of "data." Obtaining fingerprints, for example, involves an intricate technical process designed to produce a standardized transcription that can be compared with others (Nair 2021). Prior to this process, fingerprints possess neither uniqueness nor self-sameness.…”

“…Second, even seemingly "objective" bodily identifiers require individuals to furnish them in legible ways. Aadhaar enrollment depended on discrete individuals presenting themselves in person for biometric registration-wives too, as Indian men learned to their bewilderment (Nair 2021). Staff had to teach enrollees how to position their fingers on the scanner and orient their faces to the camera.…”

Theorizing Omission: State Strategies for Withholding Official Recognition of Personhood

“…In 2009, the government began issuing its 1.3 billion residents unique 12-digit numbers. Touted as a tool for facilitating social welfare provision, combating fraud, and providing access to a legal identity, Aadhaar has transformed understandings of personhood, the individual, and how the state relates to its population through data (Nair 2021).…”

Governing by Proximity: State Performance and Migrant Citizenship on the India-Pakistan Border

“…The digital reproduction and circulation of Modi's face evokes Achille Mbembe's (2001) theorization of the ways that the omnipresence of images of autocrats generates a subaltern accessibility to power in the postcolony, while also producing an excess that opens up avenues for manipulation and play (Strassler 2020). Played on personal smartphones, these videos additionally scale public and private socialities, moving between addressing the national body politic and small groups of individuals (Borgeson and Miller 2016; Gopinath 2020; Nair 2021; Udupa 2019).…”