South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic

Journal

23 | 2020
Unique Identification in India: Aadhaar, Biometrics
and Technology-Mediated Identities
Silvia Masiero and S. Shakthi (dir.)

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/6277
DOI: 10.4000/samaj.6277
ISSN: 1960-6060

Publisher
Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

Electronic reference
Silvia Masiero and S. Shakthi (dir.), South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 23 | 2020, « Unique
Identification in India: Aadhaar, Biometrics and Technology-Mediated Identities » [Online], Online since
15 September 2020, connection on 19 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/
6277 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6277

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 1

EDITOR'S NOTE
SAMAJ-EASAS Series
Series editors: Alessandra Consolaro and Sanjukta Das Gupta.

This thematic issue is the eighth in a series of issues jointly co-edited by

SAMAJ and the European Association for South Asian Studies (EASAS).
More on our partnership with EASAS here.

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 23 | 2020

 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Grappling with Aadhaar: Biometrics, Social Identity and the Indian State
Silvia Masiero and S. Shakthi

Chasing Rights in Delhi: Social Movements and the National Food Security Act
Nandini Nayak

Information and the Indian State: A Genealogy

Biswarup Sen

Crafting “Integrity”: The Implications of Authentication through Unique Identification

Databases
S. Shakthi

Biometric Infrastructures and the Indian Public Distribution System

Silvia Masiero

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 23 | 2020

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Grappling with Aadhaar: Biometrics,

Social Identity and the Indian State
Silvia Masiero and S. Shakthi

AUTHOR'S NOTE
Both authors contributed equally to this article. The authors’ names are listed in
alphabetical order.

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 23 | 2020

 4

1 The Aadhaar program has been among the

most defining socio-political projects of
the Indian state over the last decade.
Translating to “platform” or “foundation”
in several Indian languages, this colossal
identification scheme has been extended
thus far to almost 1.25 billion Indian
residents. As noted by Rao and
Nair (2019), the word Aadhaar has become
a metonymy that transcends its literal
meaning, automatically linking it to the national biometric identification project that
carries its name. Launched in 2010 by the newly-created Unique Identification
Authority of India (UIDAI), “Aadhaar” also refers to the 12-digit unique identity
number issued to residents of India upon collection of essential biometric and
demographic data that are stored in a central database. UIDAI, originally an attached
office of the Planning Commission (now NITI Aayog), is a statutory authority operating
under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology; its first Chairman,
Nandan Nilekani, was a co-founder of Infosys, one of India’s largest information
technology companies. The Aadhaar project provides an important site from which to
draw broader conclusions about the marketization of the state, situated within the
context of India’s turn to neoliberalism in recent decades. While it places an emphasis
on streamlining service delivery to marginalized residents, it also carries the potential
to profoundly redefine the relationship between the state and its subjects in starkly
transactional terms.
2 As the world’s largest biometric identification system, Aadhaar has generated a wealth
of scholarship in recent years across a number of disciplines. Much of this literature,
rooted in ethnographic field research, highlights the embeddedness of Aadhaar within
wider techno-social formations. In demonstrating that this biometric system can be a
vital lens through which we might view the social fabric of the modern Indian nation
(Rao and Greenleaf 2013), this scholarship demonstrates that Aadhaar both produces
and is a product of social relations. For example, Nair (2018) has determined that the
study of Aadhaar reveals the inherent instability of the very social identities it aims to
control and manage. This literature also inspects surveillance as an aim and result of
Aadhaar. Jacobsen (2012) has considered Aadhaar’s dual role as a tool for welfare as
well as surveillance, indicating that they are framed as being both mutually compatible
and desirable within the wider scope of the project. Other studies have examined both
theoretical (Nayar 2012) and empirically-grounded (Solanki 2019) aspects of Aadhaar as
a means of legitimizing bodies, through bodies. With one of its major aims being to
streamline access to welfare, an important subset of this literature considers the
material realities of service provision (Chaudhuri 2019; Drèze et al 2017) and the
reorientation of the state towards a market logic that views residents as consumers
(Chaudhuri and König 2018). More broadly, the role of Aadhaar in carrying out various
functions of the state is a crucial feature of many studies of the biometric system. This
is also true of a recent Special Issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (Rao and
Nair 2019), which includes papers that cover a range of topics related to techno-
governance.

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 23 | 2020

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3 Much of the literature on Aadhaar indicates that the state is moving towards defining
its relationship with subjects through forms of “coded citizenship”. The notion of
coded citizenship refers to the translation of human populations into data, resulting in
the legibility of citizens as machine-readable data ensembles (Solinas 2018; Srinivasan
and Johri 2014). In other words, coded citizenship can be viewed as the datafication of a
population (Rao and Nair 2019), or the conversion of individuals into data for the
purpose of ensuring their administrative manageability (Kitchin 2016; Taylor and
Broeders 2015). This process results in the unprecedented translating into data of
several aspects of society (Cukier and Mayer-Schonberger 2013:29). Simultaneously,
coded citizenship transforms a disparate population into uniquely identifiable subjects
through an information system’s purported ability to “de-duplicate” (Cohen 2017). The
tensions that arise from this dual focus on uniqueness and on collective manageability
are analyzed in this Special Issue, which presents new interventions in debates on the
socio-political implications of Aadhaar.
4 Constituting biopolitical technologies of rule (Rose 1999), coded citizenship can be viewed
as the digitalization of a process that has been ongoing for many decades and has
evolved over time (Ramanathan 2014; Rao and Greenleaf 2013). Yet, digitalization also
invites a number of questions that pre-digital processes alone did not raise, which are
addressed through this Special Issue in various ways. First, questions emerge around
technical aspects, such as how the conversion of populations into data is conducted and
the governance principles from which it is informed. Second, digitalization invites
questions of a broader sociotechnical nature; datafying populations generates
dichotomies between subjects who receive entitlements (leading to their
“rematerialization,” as Nayar [2012] has argued), and subjects to whom these
entitlements are denied. This leads us to further investigate the consequences of
datafication for different socio-economic groups, geographical variations in policy
implementation (or, in other words, the politics of “place”), and the underlying
political agendas that inform these datafication schemes.
5 These questions were first explored in a panel on “Coded Citizenship: Biometrics,
Identity and De-socializing Technologies in South Asia” convened at the European
Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS) 2018 and organized by Pier Giorgio Solinas
(University of Siena). The conversations that emerged there continued beyond the
conference, resulting in several thematic discussions to which colleagues from
different disciplines have contributed. These discussions have resulted in this SAMAJ/
EASAS Special Issue, which, as with the conference panel, is centered on the idea of
coded citizenship as a datafying phenomenon. Yet, in the one-year evolution from the
initial conversations among the panelists, the central focus of this discussion has
moved from a state-citizen vision (on which the original call for panel contributions
was predicated) to a more holistic view of technology as a socio-political formation.
6 Traveling beyond “coded citizenship,” then, the papers in this Special Issue present
commentaries on technology-mediated identities more broadly, through the
consideration of three perspectives on Aadhaar. Together, these three perspectives
allow us to examine the interface between society and technology in constructing
situated forms of modernity that are simultaneously new and contiguous with prior
formations. It should be noted here that the topic set for the panel—coded citizenship,
and its implications for biometric governance—was not restricted to either a particular
technology or a specific geographical location within South Asia. Yet, this Special Issue

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 23 | 2020

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comprises four papers that, from different angles, all investigate the role of Aadhaar in
the Indian socio-political context. The common focus on Aadhaar reveals the
significance of this technology for (re)shaping both social relations and modern forms
of governance.
7 However, herein lies an important caveat: the thematic commonalities across the
papers do not imply that Aadhaar is the only, or the main, technology of digital
identification that deserves discussion. The ECSAS 2018 panel brought to light the
coexistence of identification technologies within India, with the National Register of
Citizens (NRC) being intertwined with dynamics of exclusion and inclusion that deeply
impact the lives of residents (cf. Masiero 2019; Singh 2019). The National Database and
Registration Authority (NADRA) of Pakistan also featured in the ECSAS panel
discussion, and its commonalities with Aadhaar—as well as differences in terms of
project genesis and goals—generated considerations of a comparative nature. The
arguments made in this Special Issue, and the perspectives proposed in this
introductory piece, present new insights into technology-mediated social identities in
India. It is hoped that the ideas presented in this Special Issue can be used to explore
new technologies of human legibility in other geographical settings, their utilization in
converting populations into machine-readable data, and the individualities of the
subjects they are meant to govern, categorize and manage.

Aadhaar: Datafying Identity in India

8 This Special Issue approaches Aadhaar through a set of concepts that considers the
multiple meanings of coded citizenship. The four papers presented herein move
beyond the singular sociotechnical view of Aadhaar as a state-citizen mediator. They
investigate the evolution of governance on which coded citizenship is predicated,
which, as the proliferation of biometric identification schemes across the globe
highlights, has implications beyond the Indian context. Together, these papers give rise
to three distinct perspectives. Each of these perspectives constitutes a way to view
technologies for the biometric identification of individuals, and each of them is applied
to understanding Aadhaar in the papers that comprise this thematic issue. They
provide a useful framework through which to inspect broader themes such as social
inclusions and exclusions, how technology operates through social institutions, and the
discursive formulations that are engendered by these systems. Crafted on the basis of
interdisciplinary insights, the perspectives developed in this Special Issue are as
follows:

Aadhaar as datafier

9 One perspective views Aadhaar in its role as a converter of individuals into machine-
readable data. This is a technical vision of digital identity systems as routes to
datafication, which sees the database as the core instrument through which the
conversion into data is enacted. In the view of Aadhaar as datafier, technology has the
task of translating the enrolled resident—her entitlements, and what the system knows
about her—into data to be utilized for administration (Masiero and Das 2019). This
technical process enables two operations: the automated recognition of entitled
beneficiaries of services and programs, and the assignation of entitlements based on

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 23 | 2020

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what the system knows about them, as, for example, in Aadhaar-seeded programs of
social protection, where identities are matched with entitlements (Chaudhuri 2019;
Rao 2019).

Aadhaar as platform

10 Deriving from its etymological meaning of “foundation,” the second perspective views
Aadhaar as a platform on which an entire system of services is constructed. As noted by
Tilson, Sørensen and Lyytinen (2013:4626), the term “platform” itself originates from “
plat, meaning flat or level, and forme, meaning shape or arrangement of parts.”
Together the two terms imply a “flat, possibly raised surface onto which something can
be placed” (Tilson, Sørensen and Lyytinen 2013:4626), suggesting that a platform is
fundamentally a foundation on which to build. This perspective effectively conceives of
Aadhaar as an entity composed of a central core and a set of services (complements) built
on it. In the case of Aadhaar, the platform core is the database (Central Identities Data
Repository) in which all enrolled residents’ data are stored, and on which all Aadhaar-
enabled services are developed. The view of Aadhaar as platform calls for a discussion
of the generativity (Zittrain 2008) of the platform itself, a property that enables
unfiltered contributions without requiring input from the platform originators,
resulting in the complex system of services built on the basis of Aadhaar
authentication.

Aadhaar as mediated surveillance

11 The idea of biometric technology as a digital panopticon (Krishna 2019) is well-

established in studies of Aadhaar, making surveillance a useful lens through which to
study digital identification systems (Khera 2019; Rao and Nair 2019). However, the idea
of surveillance mediated by Aadhaar’s complements—the technologies built on top of
the platform—is newer, as it moves the agent of surveillance from the platform owner
(UIDAI) to all the agencies that can access and use the data stored in the database. This
changes the architecture of surveillance, moving it from centralized to distributed.
Thus, any entity with access to such data, both public (such as providers of social
protection schemes—see Nayak, this Special Issue) or private, can possess surveillance
power. Moreover, as Shakthi (this Special Issue) highlights, platform owners, and by
extension, the tools for surveillance, have themselves become distributed into the
private sphere. This leads to a conception of a new type of surveillance, based on both
access to, and ownership of, critical data.
12 The papers in this Special Issue, with their different, yet overlapping goals, present a
wider view of Aadhaar that encompasses the three perspectives outlined above. While
focusing on Aadhaar, these papers move beyond the database to demonstrate how
Aadhaar, and by extension technology itself, is an inherently socio-political
construction. As a result, the issues of coded citizenship, technology-mediated
identities and datafication as a social process constitute the focus of this collection.
13 While reading this Special Issue, two points must be kept in mind. First, the three
perspectives proposed here—Aadhaar as a datafier of citizens, a platform for services,
and an enabler of mediated surveillance—offer an integrative, rather than mutually
exclusive, way of examining the same technology. While all three can be applied to a

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 23 | 2020

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vision of identification systems as state-citizen mediators, they are also representative

of broader techno-social formations. Each of the four papers in the Special Issue
provides a different combination of these perspectives, foregrounding some while
implicitly commenting on others, thereby illuminating particular aspects of Aadhaar.
Collectively they demonstrate that, to understand datafied systems for identification, it
is important to integrate different methodological and epistemological approaches.
14 Second, Aadhaar should not be considered in isolation, but as part of the broader
ecosystem in which it is inscribed. In the central government’s Economic
Survey 2014-2015, two new technologies were featured: the first was the Pradhan
Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (commonly referred to as Jan Dhan Yojana), a financial
inclusion program that offers zero-balance bank accounts to low-income households
(Kaur and Singh 2015); the second was mobile devices, whose ownership has increased
at very high rates over the last two decades. What emerged, referred to as JAM Trinity
(an acronym for Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and mobile phones), is the ecosystem in
which Aadhaar operates. This positions the platform as part of a grand design of digital
financialization (Jain and Gabor 2020) that affects entitlement distributions (Nayak, this
Special Issue) and the architecture of the national social protection system (Masiero,
this Special Issue). Similarly, the multiple legal challenges to the validity of Aadhaar
since its inception, and the recent Supreme Court verdict on its very constitutionality,
highlight its complex relationship with other socio-political institutions (Rao and
Nair 2019). This collection emphasizes that Aadhaar is part of a broader sociotechnical
environment that deeply influences public governance and people’s lived experience
through its workings.

Papers in this Special Issue

15 The threefold taxonomy of perspectives outlined above offers a way to study
technology-mediated identities through the framework of Aadhaar. Below we use our
taxonomy of perspectives to introduce the four papers that comprise this collection.
16 In the first paper, Biswarup Sen argues that the conception of the Aadhaar project
underpins the turn of the Indian state to an informational model of society, revealing
the rationale of using digital technologies in the service of public governance.
Highlighting that this informational model is the byproduct of a long history, Sen
traces the core phases of datafying technologies from colonial India to the present,
demonstrating a line of continuity between colonial technologies of rule and the
present scheme for biometric identification. Through this historical perspective, Sen
traces how information becomes what he terms a “state good,” strongly centralized on
the one hand, but also flexible—and generative—in the unfiltered contributions that
the platform core allows. Presenting Aadhaar as byproduct of a precise historical
evolution, Sen’s paper infuses new meaning into the notion of “technologies of rule” at
the root of the debate on coded citizenship in postcolonial nations.
17 In the second paper, Nandini Nayak adopts a socio-legal perspective to highlight the
advent of rights-based approaches to development management that have acquired
prominence in India as well as in the formulation of anti-poverty policies on a global
scale. She focuses on the development of laws that have created new legal rights, and
details the principles of the universality of fundamental rights on which the National
Food Security Act (NFSA) was developed, along with the right-to-food mobilization that

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 23 | 2020

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became intertwined with it. Against the backdrop of the right-to-food movement,
Nayak’s paper frames Aadhaar as a datafier that, while enabling possibilities for better
governance of food security schemes, effectively results in exclusion errors that
prevent the actualization of right-to-food affordances. This tension between the
imagining of universal rights, the strategies used to achieve them, and the social
realities that might inhibit their efficacy is a central feature of her analysis. With her
conception of Aadhaar as platform for provision of food security schemes such as the
Public Distribution System (PDS), Nayak illustrates the transformational effect of
Aadhaar on program governance, as well as on people’s ability to access the
entitlements offered by the rights-based approach of the NFSA.
18 In the third paper, S. Shakthi examines the prevalent framing of biometric
identification technologies as a tool for combating “fraud.” Moving away from a purely
state-citizen perspective, Shakthi focuses on NASSCOM, the Indian IT industry
employers’ association, and its creation of a unique identification database (the
National Skills Registry—NSR) for the verification of IT employees. Drawing on her
fieldwork on the NSR in Chennai’s IT industry, she interrogates the discursive
construction of employee “integrity” prevalent in the industry to illustrate the forms of
self-disciplining that the mere existence of such a database can entail. The paper
provides a comparative framework through which to study Aadhaar’s implications for
individual privacy. In observing the affordances of biometric systems for mediated
surveillance outside the state-citizen context, it also sheds light on the particular ways
in which state-managed biometric strategies might operate as population management
devices.
19 In the final paper, Silvia Masiero reflects on her nine-year research on the
transformation of India’s PDS, enacted by digital technologies first and more recently
by Aadhaar’s infrastructure. Based on her fieldwork on the biometric PDS in Kerala and
Karnataka, she illustrates the effects of the transition to an Aadhaar-based PDS, both on
the governance of the scheme and on the entitlements of recipients. Emphasizing the
connections between the datafier and platform perspectives of techno-social
frameworks, she highlights the persistence of exclusion errors in the scheme, and the
teleology of policy change (from subsidies to cash transfers) underlying the
incorporation of Aadhaar into a transformed PDS. The paper concludes the Special
Issue’s reflections on the transformative power of biometric infrastructures, while also
considering different ways for a computerized PDS to become centered on inclusion.
20 As a final note, Aadhaar is frequently referred to as a blueprint for the design of
biometric architectures around the globe, whose consequences in developing nations
have received attention in academic research (Masiero and Prakash 2019). In opening
this collection of papers, we therefore re-emphasize how Aadhaar has become a
metonymy for a way of governing, and for a development rationality in which data is
an instrument for the inclusive provision of public services. By extension, we consider
the use of data to categorize targeted populations and the various manifestations of
these processes. Similarly, trade-offs between attempts to remake the government’s
image through Aadhaar and the issues experienced by datafied residents are a
recurring theme in this collection, which calls for investigations into other instances in
which biometrics and the search for “development” are connected. Through its in-
depth study of a technology which has served as a model for many others, this Special

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 23 | 2020

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Issue offers a way of approaching the debate on the multiple linkages between
biometrics, socio-economic development and technology-mediated citizenship.

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INDEX
Keywords: Aadhaar, biometrics, social identity, India, governance

AUTHORS
SILVIA MASIERO
School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 23 | 2020

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S. SHAKTHI
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras

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Chasing Rights in Delhi: Social

Movements and the National Food
Security Act
Nandini Nayak

“These days, Aadhaar is a key tool used to attack

the poor”
Bhasha Singh, Journalist, speaking as a Panelist at
the National Public Hearing on “Living with
Hunger,” Right to Food Campaign, Delhi, 15
March 2018.

Introduction: Contextualising ‘Rights Based

Approaches’ to Development
1 The 2000s saw the enactment of legislations related to civil, political, economic and
social rights in India, that advocated a “rights-based approach” to development. Driven
by social movements that emerged in the Indian context (Khera 2013;
Nayak 2008, 2016, 2017; Ruparelia 2013), legislations enacted from 2005-2013 in one way
or another made a case for the extension and expansion of Constitutional Rights and in
turn the idea of citizenship. Specifically, a Right to Information Act aimed at creating
transparency in governance was passed by the Indian Parliament in 2005. Two
legislations expanding social democratic rights, and creating rights to social protection
included the following—the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), passed
in 2005,1 followed by a Right to Education Act for children in the six to fourteen age
group in 2009.2 A right to land titles in forest areas was created under a Forest Rights
Act in 2006.3 The National Food Security Act (NFSA), which details economic claims and
rights related to food and nutrition, was passed by the Indian Parliament in 2013. The
enactment of these legislations drew on a history of collective action and litigation
related to Constitutional law, as highlighted later in this paper. Nonetheless, the above
mentioned legislations expanded the idea of citizenship by creating new justiciable

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 23 | 2020

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rights that citizens could claim against the state as an extension of rights available in
Constitutional law.
2 In recent years, the process of implementation of these legislations, has, in one way or
another been circumscribed by two mechanisms: first, by the use of the Aadhaar
biometric identification system as a tool for implementation of these programs, and
second, by the use of executive orders, that undermine enacted rights. It may be noted
that some but not all of these executive orders pertain to the use of Aadhaar for
program implementation. It could be suggested that the celebrated expansion of
citizenship by way of the above mentioned legislations has in the recent past faced a
backlash and has been superseded by technological and administrative gate keeping, or
the creation of a “precarious” and “coded” citizenship.4
3 This paper draws on primary research carried out between 2015 and 2018, which
included a household survey in four districts in Delhi on accessing food under the
National Food Security Act. The article also draws on government records on
implementation of the National Food Security Act as well as archival records of the
Right to Food Campaign, India.
4 In section two, I contextualise the enactment of recent “rights based legislations” in
India, highlighting that struggles related to claiming citizenship have a long history in
the country, an important part of which pertains to litigation related to Constitutional
law. In section three, I discuss the implications of rights enactment, particularly in
relation to the Public Distribution System (PDS) a program for distribution of
subsidized food grains brought under the NFSA in 2013. In section four, I argue that
while biometric identification technologies and administrative interpretations of the
law create new forms of exclusion from social protection and a hurdle to accessing
citizenship, collective action serves to render these exclusions visible, thus creating the
possibility that rights legislations will retain progressive potential (Santos 2002).

A brief history of rights-based collective action in India

(and, accounting for the enactment of “new rights”)
5 The historical root of the recently enacted legislations can be traced to a wave of
litigation based on Constitutional law that began from the late 1970s onwards in the
period following the Internal Emergency in India from 1975-1977. The late 1970s and
1980s saw a significant phase of what Indian jurist Upendra Baxi (1985) calls “judicial
activism,” which in turn is one of the factors that helps explain the context that led to
the enactment of the above mentioned statutes. Social movements arguing for all of the
above legislations have built on and used legal pronouncements from the higher courts
and the Supreme Court of India while making a case for new rights in law. Collective
action for the right to food grew around a writ petition, filed in the Supreme Court of
India by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties in 2001. 5 This writ petition was filed
against the backdrop of a severe drought that was affecting several parts of the
country. The Right to Food campaign—a network of civil society actors spread across
the country—grew around grassroots mobilizations and research related to this civil
writ petition, several years prior to the enactment of the NFSA in 2013. 6
6 This of course still leaves the question of why these legislations were enacted in the
above mentioned period (2005-2013). Part of the answer to this question might be

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found in work done by Deepta Chopra (2011) on the process that went into the
enactment of the NREGA in particular. Chopra discusses the blurred boundaries
between “state” and “society” in the Indian case that allowed key social movement
actors to engage directly in the law making process for NREGA, which was replicated to
an extent in the enactment of the National Food Security Act, 2013.
7 It may be noted that the rights based approach to development has also been popular
in the international development bureaucracy since the 2000s. In the international
development arena, rights based approaches to development acquired prominence in
the mainstream, in a period when the Washington Consensus, that advocated extensive
state withdrawal from social protection and provisioning, had come to be widely
criticized. The Post-Washington Consensus that followed advocated bringing the state
back into development, making a case for state accountability in relation to social
protection programs (Saad-Filho 2010). As discussed later in this section, social
movements pushing for new ‘rights’ in India were not driven by, and did not locate
their intellectual origins in, the international acceptance of rights based approaches to
development mentioned above. In the Indian context, the use of collective action and
Constitutional law to challenge state excesses and demand probity in implementation
of government programs has had independent and often very local historical roots.
Nonetheless, even movements for the ‘right to food and work’ in India did deploy the
‘rights talk’ of the development mainstream in their claim making against the state. It
might be suggested that the Congress-I led United Progressive Alliance (UPA)
government in power in India, in the period of enactment of these legislations, found
the narrative of rights acceptable, partly owing to the international acceptance of the
rights agenda. Part of the explanation for the enactment of new laws then, if
marginally and somewhat tangentially, might be related to the “emergence of rights as
an emancipatory script” (Santos 2002) in international development discourse.
8 The foundation of the Aadhaar based biometric system was also laid down by the
Congress-I led UPA, in 2009. A more conservative right-leaning Bhartiya Janata Party
(BJP) government took office at the Centre in Delhi in 2014, after which the use of
Aadhaar expanded significantly. So while there has been some cross-party acceptance
of Aadhaar as a techno-managerial tool, it can be argued that the significant expansion
of Aadhaar based implementation of rights legislations after 2014 became an important
administrative device through which to argue for efficiency on the one hand and to
simultaneously reign in the citizenship rights that were earlier expanded with the
enactment of the aforementioned legislations.
9 I now return to the discussion on “judicial activism” and “(constitutional) rights based
collective action” which I began earlier, with the aim of providing a historical context
to the enactment of new legislations like the NREGA and NFSA. This discussion is also
aimed at putting Aadhaar linked “coded-citizenship” in perspective. The introduction
of the Aadhaar system introduces new kinds of vulnerability and precarity in claiming
rights, as is highlighted later. It is argued however, that that there is a constantly
evolving process of contestation between the expansion of and reigning in of claims to
citizenship. Within this contentious process, collective action and public dissent have
been key to retaining a progressive idea of citizenship.
10 A history of litigation related to Constitutional law can be traced to the early 1980s. The
higher courts7 where writs of mandamus 8 and habeas corpus 9 could be filed, evolved a
particular tradition of Social Action Litigation (Baxi 1985), where rules related to locus

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standi10 were waived. The waiver of rules related to locus standi implied that even
without being directly affected by a violation of Constitutional or legal rights, an
organization or individual could file a writ in a higher court of law, on behalf of persons
whose rights were violated. As highlighted by Baxi (1985), Social Action Litigation in
India was focused substantially on civil and political rights violations experienced by
the rural and urban poor at the hands of the state.11 The rights being drawn on in the
wave of Social Action Litigations12 from the early 1980s onwards were constitutionally
defined “fundamental rights,” or civil, political, economic and social rights laid out in
Part III of the Constitution of India.13 Constitutional theory and practice were viewed as
being at the very center of Indian development and democracy (Baxi 2001).
11 In a number of landmark cases, the Supreme Court of India expanded the meaning of
the fundamental “right to life and personal liberty” under Article 21 of the Constitution
of India (Bhushan 2004:1774). The “right to life” under Article 21 was interpreted to
include within its meaning a wide range of civil and political rights that were not
explicitly written into the Constitution. Thus, Article 21 of the Constitution of India was
interpreted to include the civil right to trial without delay in the event of arrest
[Hussainara Khatoon case, 1980] and a right against forced labor [Bandhua Mukti
Morcha case, 1984].
12 Litigation related to Part III of the Constitution of India was also used to seek economic
rights. Thus without the actual enactment of a legislation, the Judgement in the Olga
Tellis case (1986) stated that “pavement dwellers” (or shack dwellers) in Bombay have a
right to housing and livelihood and a right against eviction by the Municipal
Corporation. Employment works or public works implemented by central and state
governments were also the subject of social action litigation in the early 1980s. In 1983,
the Supreme Court passed a judgement under Article 23 (right against human
trafficking and forced labor) and Article 14 (equality before law and equal protection
before the law)14 of the Constitution of India in the Sanjit Roy v. State of Rajasthan case,
where the case judgement emphasized that State governments would stand accused of
engaging forced labor (or bonded labor) if the statutory minimum wage was not paid to
workers engaged on public worksites run by the government.15 Thus the Supreme Court
clearly stated that a statutory minimum wage must be paid by the State when it acts as
employer on public worksites. Importantly, the public worksites referred to here, were
precursors to those now implemented under the NREGA.
13 Social action litigation based on Constitutional law and the interpretation of
fundamental rights was thus critical to “expanding” the idea of “citizenship” for
“India’s poor” (Baxi 1985:115). Baxi traces this significant change in the role of the
Indian higher judiciary to “judicial populism” as a form of “catharsis” in the aftermath
of the internal Emergency imposed in India from 1975-1977 (Baxi 1985:107–8). During
the Emergency, the Supreme Court effectively towed the line of the Executive. In
contrast, in the post-Emergency period and particularly throughout the 1980s, the
higher judiciary played an interventionist role often issuing directions to the Executive
to carry out its relevant functions. In the process, the Supreme Court of India
“established the principle that the judiciary was morally required and constitutionally
mandated to increase its responsiveness to citizen requests for remedial action” in
relation to government agencies (Goetz and Jenkins 2001:367–8).
14 The moot point here is that though not without its contradictions, this was an
important phase in the expansion of the idea of citizenship drawing on constitutional

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rights. To some extent the “post-colonial legal fiction of equality before law”
(Chatterjee 1984) was challenged by way of social action litigation, with the expansive
interpretation particularly of Article 21 of the Constitution of India. As is the case with
the present period of precarious access to rights, there was inherent contestation in
the process of demanding the expansion of the idea of citizenship.
15 The trend of “pro-poor” decisions from the Supreme Court of India in the 1980s had
abated by the 1990s. Prashant Bhushan (2004), for instance, cites several cases where in
the 1990s, the Supreme Court took a position of non-interference with executive
decisions of the government of the day. In a prominent case pertaining to government
disinvestment from BALCO,16 a state run company, a social action litigation was filed in
the Supreme Court raising concerns about the loss to the public exchequer due to the
arbitrary price at which the company was being sold. The case was dismissed by the
Supreme Court. Amongst other observations the Court stated, “public interest litigation
(sic.) was not meant to be a weapon to challenge…financial or economic
decisions...taken by the government in exercise of their administrative power.”
Importantly for the purpose of this paper, Bhushan also cites instances where the
Supreme Court put forward overtly “anti-poor” decisions. In a judgement delivered in
2000, the Supreme Court ruled against the right to housing of slum dwellers in the
capital, New Delhi. In this petition, arguing for the re-housing of evicted slum dwellers,
the Court observed “the promise of free land at tax-payers expense (in place of a slum
hutment)...attracts land gabbers (and is akin to) giving a reward to a pickpocket.” 17
16 The 1980s trend of progressive legal judgements rooted in constitutionally mandated
fundamental rights was therefore not linear by any means, and had abated by the 1990s
(Bhushan 2004). Yet, in 2001, the Supreme Court accepted a petition, once again linked
to Article 21 of the Constitution of India, where significant orders were passed by the
Court on food related welfare programs of the Government of India. The case, popularly
known as the “right to food case,” was filed by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties
acting on behalf of a larger collective of organizations, the Akaal Sangharh Samiti (ASS)
(or, drought action committee) (Drèze 2002). The point of law being argued was that
the denial of the right to food amounts to a denial of the fundamental right to life and
personal liberty. The petition filed in the Supreme Court of India argued that despite
the fact that unprecedented food stocks had been accumulated at government
storehouses, the State Government of Rajasthan had refused to either distribute food or
initiate employment works as a drought relief measure in the face of a severe drought
and mass hunger. The petitioner argued that the State of Rajasthan was, in effect,
abrogating its duty to protect the right to food and (by extension) the right to life of
the drought-affected population. A more recent and seminal judgement expanding
citizenship rights was delivered in 2017, in the K. S. Puttaswamy case, where the
Supreme Court held that the “right to privacy” is essential to leading a life of dignity.
17 Collective action was central to the PUCL v. Union of India or “right to food case” filed
in the Supreme Court in 2001. In fact, much of the surge in social action litigation in the
1980s, in addition to being effectively encouraged by the Supreme Court, was also
supported by activist groups and organizations. Speaking about activism and the
Supreme Court’s ‘cathartic’ engagement with social action litigation in post emergency
India, Baxi comments that the law and fundamental rights have been used as a tool by
activist groups, and further that, “in a sense the New Politics (in India) (was) broadly
constitutional politics” (1986:58). This “New Politics,” based on a language of “rights,”

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acquired prominence despite raising several significant questions regarding the

separation of powers between the legislature, executive and the judiciary, a feature of
all modern Constitutions. Yet, judicial activism driven by social movements, the
blurring of boundaries between state and society (Chopra 2011), and indeed between
the organs of government (Baxi 1985) helps explain recent rights based development
and contestations over citizenship in India.
18 I now move to discussing the efficacy of rights, and by extension the potential for the
expansion of the idea of citizenship.

Do rights work?
19 There is a substantial amount of literature theorizing the efficacy of rights. In the
present context it might be pertinent to ask, what is the theoretical response to
whether a text of rights can work in and of itself? Or is it the case that the working of
rights requires more than the presence of legal text? A Member of the Indian
Parliament, D. Raja18, while attending a Right to Food Campaign meeting on disruption
in PDS implementation due to Aadhaar (March 15, 2018) stated, “questioning how the
NFSA (the law) works must be done in many forums…both in Parliament and outside
Parliament (including on the streets).”
20 In light of the focus of this paper, a key question then is that if collective action is an
important part of how rights-in-text can translate to rights that are in fact realized,
what is the specific implication of the deployment of techno-managerial tools such as
Aadhaar numbers for claiming rights such as food grain under the PDS? One response
might be that since written citizenship rights merely create the “possibility” of
“emancipation” (Santos 2002), the process of claiming rights from the state in the face
of new technologies such as Aadhar effectively involves the deployment of new—and
old—“repertoires of contention” to claim rights (Tarrow 2011). Thus, even in the
moment of technological coded citizenship, the long history of collective action
(Sinha 2008) for rights to information, food and work, has a critical importance and
relevance. In short, old repertoires of contention have had to be expanded and attuned
to a new context in order to respond to new challenges related to social policy
implementation.
21 I move now to a brief analytical discussion related to the question of the relevance of
rights, after which I move to discussing implementation of the PDS under the NFSA.
22 As mentioned above, an important question worth considering is whether a “language
of rights” can contribute to the realization of progressive social change (Hunt 1990).
Progressive social movements across geographical and political spaces have sought to
use the law as a tool for social change. Amongst these movements, one can include
groups as diverse as the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s
(Hunt 1990; McCann 2006), and the “right to information,” the “right to food” and the
“right to work” campaigns in India in more recent years (Drèze 2002; Drèze and
Khera 2017; Goetz and Jenkins 2001; Khera 2011, 2013; Mander and Joshi 1998). 19
23 There is a tension between “liberal” and “social democratic” arguments for rights,
within the literature theorizing rights. Liberal legal jurisprudence makes a case for
individual freedom, rights and duties (Menon 2004; Sypnowich 1992). Critical Legal
Theorists question the “liberal legal ideals of impartiality and individual rights,” since

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these mask domination (Scheingold 2004:204), and according to Marxist legal scholars,
“maintain the rule of the dominant class” (Sypnowich 1992:80–1). Yet, critical legal
theorists of diverse persuasions draw on the language of rights to argue for social
change.
24 Proponents in favor of rights include those who argue that rights are “a significant, yet
not exclusive vehicle for realizing the goals of progressive social movements,” thereby
questioning the “liberal faith in rights” (Hunt 1990:309). Stuart Scheingold, for
instance, warns that the discourse of rights might only serve to propel the “myth” that
rights can, in fact, be realized. In effect he argues against unquestioning “faith” in the
“political efficacy and ethical sufficiency of law as a principal of government”
(Scheingold 2004:17). Boavetura de Sousa Santos suggests that “law has both a
regulatory or even repressive potential, and (also) an emancipatory potential” and,
further, that “the way law’s potential evolves, whether towards regulation or
emancipation, has nothing to do with the autonomy and self-reflexivity of the law, but
rather with the political mobilization of competing social forces” (Santos 2002:85).
25 In relation to the “right to information,” the “right to work” and the “right to food” in
the Indian case, it is pertinent to consider the extent to which these legal enactments
have led to a significant shift in power relations, or whether existing dynamics of
power are left undisturbed by these “new rights.” Further, it is worth dwelling on the
inherently contested process of the implementation of “new rights” enacted by the
Indian Parliament. I now turn to these issues.

Has the NFSA worked?

26 The National Food Security Act (NFSA), enacted by Parliament in 2013, brought the pre-
existing Public Distribution System (PDS) under its fold. Other government programs
brought under the legal framework of the NFSA were the mid-day meal scheme
(MDMS) for school children; a nutritional scheme aimed at 0–6 year olds, pregnant
women, nursing mothers and adolescent girls under the Integrated Child Development
Services (ICDS), and a scheme for Maternity Entitlements. The NFSA expanded the
scope of implementation of the PDS, ICDS and MDMS, while universal maternity
entitlements introduced in the NFSA were entirely new. Thus, in relation to key social
protection programs, NFSA enactment implied a progressive expansion in citizens’
rights coded in law.
27 The Public Distribution System itself has long history of implementation in India
starting from the late colonial period (Mooij 1999). In the post-Independence decades
from the 1950s to the 1980s, there was an expansion in the public distribution system,
with the program veering towards near universal implementation by the 1980s. A
significant change was made in the PDS in 1997, when the program was explicitly
reorganized to be targeted to Below Poverty Line households. In the years between
1997 and 2013, Tamil Nadu continued to implement a universal program, while other
states—most prominently Chhattisgarh—made improvements in state level
institutional arrangements for the program (Khera 2011; Drèze and Khera 2017).
Nonetheless, at a national scale, the enactment of the NFSA in 2013 marked a
significant moment of institutional expansion of the PDS, from an earlier situation
where the scope of the program had been reduced in the vast majority of states.

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28 Under the NFSA, the PDS was to extend to 75 percent of the rural population and 50
percent of the urban population of India.20 Household surveys conducted in several
states after NFSA enactment suggested that access to food – and in turn citizenship
rights – had in fact expanded. Drèze et. al. (2016) conducted a survey of 3600
households in June 2016 in six of India’s poorest states, namely Bihar, Chhattisgarh,
Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal. It was found that the proportion
of sample households with PDS ration cards after NFSA implementation was 27 percent
higher than before NFSA implementation.
29 A survey of 320 PDS beneficiary households from four Districts in Delhi (Northwest,
West, East and South) conducted during May—July 201621 had a similar finding in
relation to the expansion of PDS ration cards. It was found that among sample
households, access to the PDS had expanded after NFSA implementation, with 26.5
percent of sample households stating they did not have PDS ration cards before NFSA
implementation. Importantly, 87 percent of sample households stated they had
purchased PDS food grain at least once in the four months preceding the survey; in
other words, they had used their legal entitlement to actually purchase food from their
local “fair price shop” (or “ration shop”) (c.f. Nayak and Nehra 2017).
30 In the Delhi survey, it was found that an important aspect of implementation was
adherence to Section 13 of NFSA, which states the eldest adult female will be recorded
as the Head of Household for the purpose of the PDS ration card, unless such a person
does not exist. Amongst sample households, the head of household on the PDS ration
card was a woman in 98 percent of the cases. Thus citizenship claims pushed by NFSA
implementation were not merely related to social protection, but were also gendered
and emancipatory in other ways. The potential significance of the NFSA as a source of
social security could also be gauged by looking at the profile of the heads of
households. Of the sample households covered, 69 per cent of heads of household were
educated up to class VIII (Middle School) or lower. 67 percent of heads of household
stated they were home-makers and did not have a regular source of income. 20 percent
of the remaining heads of household indicated they had precarious access to work,
including as domestic household workers, or they were currently unemployed. Only 4
percent heads of household stated they had a regular source of income, although, very
importantly, not a single one of them was in contractually secure employment. For
these households, food grain accessed from the PDS was a significant means of coping
with vulnerability (c.f. Nayak and Nehra 2017).
31 Despite these positive trends, implementation has been marked by a complex politics.
As discussed earlier, rights defined by the legislature have to some extent been eroded
by government orders on implementation issued by the Executive.
32 Between January and March 2017, no less than 60 Gazette Notifications were issued by
various Ministries of the Government of India, stating that Aadhaar should be used in
the process of service delivery of various government programs.22 These notifications
were issued not only in relation to social protection or the rights legislations
mentioned above, but even for purposes as diverse as the registration of small and
medium enterprises23 and to register births and deaths 24. The introduction of Aadhaar
and related technology for implementation of the National Food Security Act thus took
place against the backdrop of a widespread expansion of the use of Aadhaar but had a
corrosive effect on program implementation.

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33 As per law, applying for the Aadhaar number was deemed “voluntary” for all residents
of India.25 The spread of implementation of the technically voluntary Aadhaar number
coincided with a period in 2016/17 when there was some optimism in relation to the
implementation of social protection programs, including the Public Distribution
System (PDS) for subsidized food grain (see Drèze, et. al. 2016, Nayak and Nehra 2017,
cited above). This optimism in relation to PDS implementation was disrupted by the use
of Aadhaar. Exclusion from social protection was not entirely new (see for instance
Drèze and Khera, 2010, on inclusion and exclusion errors in the identification of Below
Poverty Line households). The deployment of technological hurdles to access citizenship
rights were, nonetheless, a new form of exclusion from social protection. These hurdles
along with the deployment of conservative executive interpretations of law (explained
later in this section) led to a reigning in of rights defined under NFSA.
34 As a consequence of Aadhaar based implementation of the PDS, pinning down
responsibility for poor implementation on identifiable individuals at the level of the
Panchayat (in rural areas) or Circle office (in urban areas) or District became
increasingly difficult. In fact, this new form of exclusion from social protection gave
state functionaries an excuse for apathy and poor implementation, since technological
errors have no human face. Reliance on the Aadhaar system has also been found to be
problematic because the system excludes individuals who do not have an Aadhaar card.
Where a beneficiary has an Aadhaar card, the biometrics and internet dependent
delivery system may still not work if biometrics are not recognized by the Point of Sale
(POS) device used to authenticate sale of subsidized food grain, or if the machine does
not work due to electricity or internet connectivity issues.
35 In relation to Aadhaar related erosion of access to rights, the Delhi survey found that of
the sample households, 44 per cent had between one and four household members
missing from their ration cards. For 48 percent of households that had a family member
missing from the ration card, a stated reason for exclusion of these household members
was absence of an Aadhaar card (Nayak and Nehra 2017). Importantly, for a majority of
households accessing the PDS under the NFSA26, five kilograms of food rations per
person per month are allocated on the basis of the number of family members. Thus for
each missing member on a ration card, the family lost a significant quantity of food
rations per month. Even worse deprivations, and indeed “attacks on the poor”
highlighted by Bhasha Singh towards the beginning of this paper, have been
documented by the Right to Food campaign in the state of Jharkhand. Access to rations
was found to have been denied in households where the ration card was not linked with
Aadhaar, leading to starvation deaths in several documented cases (Right to Food
Campaign India 2018).27
36 Yet, as highlighted earlier, in addition to Aadhaar based disruptions, executive orders
of the government that do not pertain to Aadhaar have also contributed to eroding
access to rights. The most crucial executive order of the central government related to
PDS implementation after NFSA enactment was the PDS Control Order, 2015. In this
order, the central Government of India imposed a state-wise numerical cap on PDS
beneficiaries based on census data for 2011. However, this numerical cap on
beneficiaries did not account for a yearly growth rate in the population since it was to
be revised only after data from the next census became available. Thus as part of PDS
implementation under NFSA, the Government of Delhi was mandated by the
Government of India to identify 72.78 lakh beneficiaries to whom PDS entitlements

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would be targeted. This was an executive order fundamentally at odds with the
expansion of the “right to food” under the NFSA. Rather than a year on year expansion
in the number of beneficiaries to honor the percentage of the population mandated to
be covered under NFSA, the number of beneficiaries was to be frozen at the
aforementioned figure based on the 2011 Census, until the date of release of the next
census figures.
37 The revised PDS did away with the former Below Poverty Lines (BPL) and Above
Poverty Line (APL) categories of households and classified beneficiary households as
“priority households” and households that were to get PDS benefits under the
“Antyodaya Anna Yojana.”28 Due to the new classification of households as well as the
rationale of increasing transparency and reducing corruption in PDS implementation,
all new NFSA-PDS ration cards issued in Delhi from 2013 onwards were seeded with
Aadhaar numbers of household members.29 A parallel process of Fair Price Shop
automation, or the use of Aadhaar and internet enabled POS devices at PDS shops, had
also been unfolding in Delhi. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal from the Aam Aadmi
Party (AAP), or “Common Man’s Party,” announced in October 2016 that all fair price
shops in the state would be equipped with Aadhaar enabled POS devices by March 2017.
Meanwhile, in February 2017, the central Government of India issued a Gazette
Notification mandating the use of Aadhaar in PDS service delivery. This came three and
a half years after Aadhaar based implementation of the PDS in Delhi had, in one way or
another, already started. Thus, although Aadhaar enabled distribution of food grain had
not commenced in 2013, Aadhaar seeded PDS ration cards were already being issued in
Delhi, under the National Food Security Ordinance, even before the NFSA was passed by
the Indian Parliament. However after the Gazette notification in February 2017, the
Delhi Right to Food Campaign (DRRAA, Delhi Rozi Roti Adhikaar Abhiyaan) filed a writ
petition in the High Court of Delhi seeking transparency in PDS implementation and
challenging Aadhaar based implementation of the PDS in Delhi. 30 It was argued that this
form of implementation leads to exclusions and significant hardships for persons and
households entitled to subsidized food grain under the PDS. That the entitled persons
are poor and economically vulnerable was emphasized in the petition filed in court.
38 These challenges to Aadhaar based implementation of the PDS from civil society groups
led to the AAP withdrawing its support for PDS implementation routed via Aadhaar and
POS enabled devices. Instead, in early 2018, the AAP put its political weight behind
demanding that PDS food grains should be delivered to the doorsteps of beneficiary
households. In May-June 2018, this matter was at the center of a tussle between the
elected Government of Delhi run by the AAP on the one hand and the un-elected, but
constitutionally mandated, administrative head of Delhi state, the Lt. Governor (LG) of
Delhi, on the other.
39 The DRRAA’s legal challenge, seeking transparency in PDS implementation in Delhi is
ongoing, though the Supreme Court, in 2018 permitted the use of Aadhaar for social
protection programs. These legal challenges in courts of law have also gone along with
the organization of both Delhi state level and National level public hearings on flawed
Aadhaar based implementation of the PDS (such as the public hearing on 15 March
2018, cited earlier in this paper).
40 These multiple challenges to Aadhaar enabled PDS implementation are cited not to
suggest that all flaws in implementation have successfully been blocked by social
movements using legal and other means of protest. Rather, it is being suggested that

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rights-in-text almost necessarily require the “use of law beyond the law” (Santos 2002),
or collective claim making, for them to be realized.
41 The next section of this paper will look at empirical material related to civil society
actors engaged in the implementation of new rights, particularly with a view to
detailing the actors involved in the complex process of translating rights-in-text to
rights that can be claimed. As mentioned earlier, the present challenge to coded
citizenship by social movements needs to be located in the “long history” of collective
action. That history might reveal that in the world of the uniquely anomic, Aadhaar
tagged, coded citizen, who faces shrinking social protection, tools of contention such as
litigation based on Constitutional law, protests in parliament and on the streets, the
use of letters of protest, as well as the use of social media, are all crucial for the law to
retain emancipatory potential.

Social movements and rights legislations

42 This section relies on interviews conducted with members of social movements, the
authors’ own location as a participant in the Right to Food campaign, and on a survey
of the well catalogued and extensive archives of the Right to Food Campaign. 31
43 This section highlights that there is a heterogeneous group of civil society actors
engaged with demanding effective implementation of legislations like the NFSA and
NREGA. A vast majority, if not all of them, work on the question of “claiming
citizenship” and “deepening democracy” (Harriss 2001), by seeking transparency in
implementation of new rights legislations and by keeping the public debate related to
these legislations alive.
44 The types of civil society actors engaged with implementation of the NFSA and NREGA 32
can roughly be classified into the following categories:
a. Grassroots organizations funded by individual donations and fees levied on members (as
against funds from institutional donors, such as national NGOs, bilateral or multilateral
agencies).
b. Non-government organizations that may receive institutional donor funding. These
organizations may do work as diverse as academic research on implementation of rights
based legislations; documenting violations of rights; filing Right to Information applications
to understand why rights violations are taking place; carrying out “social audits” related to
NFSA implementation.
c. Registered trade unions typically funded by a membership fees and individual donations (for
example, the Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan (JJSS) in Araria district, Bihar). In addition to tasks
linked to a) and b), in relation to NREGA, the JJSS was also involved in a public interest
litigation33 filed in the Bihar High Court, challenging Government of India and Government
of Bihar orders related to the reduction of wages paid to NREGA workers. The JJSS was thus
using courts of law to push for better NREGA implementation.
d. Umbrella organizations made up of civil society groups, such as the Delhi Right to Food
Campaign (DRRAA, or Delhi Rozi Roti Adhikaar Abhiyan), which include individuals, academics,
students and activists, some of whom may be formally employed by, or enrolled in,
universities and other institutions. As mentioned above in the context of Delhi, the DRRAA
filed a writ petition in the Delhi High Court in 2017 that, apart from other matters,
questioned the use of Aadhaar in PDS implementation.

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e. Informal civil rights groups, including collectives of students, academics, lawyers and
activists. Here too, individuals may have formal institutional affiliations, for instance with
NGOs and universities. This fluid and heterogeneous category may be associated with a
range of activities, including those mentioned above, as well as conducting surveys on social
policy implementation. These groups are also involved in awareness generation on rights
legislations by way of creating easy to read posters and videos for circulation on social
media platforms. They are also involved in running campaigns on social media platforms
that aim to scrutinize the use of Aadhaar for social policy implementation. 34

45 The above is not an exhaustive list and there may be overlaps in the categories cited
above. It is crucial to note, however, that there is a heterogeneous set of actors engaged
in both claiming citizenship and checking the erosion of citizenship through
technological tools such as Aadhaar.

Conclusion
46 This paper discusses the politics involved in the process of claiming citizenship rights
under legislations such as the NFSA. Claiming citizenship is inherently contentious and
involves processes of struggle (Kabeer 2005). In order to understand and contextualise
the present precarity of coded citizenship rooted in technological devices such as the
Aadhaar biometric system, this paper starts by taking a look back at discussions related
to citizenship rooted in Constitutional law. As is highlighted by Baxi, the law and
constitutional fundamental rights were “used as tools by activist groups” to forge a
new, progressive politics in the period following the Internal Emergency in India
(1975-1977). Social action litigation expanded the idea of citizenship via progressive
and expansive interpretations of key Articles of the Constitution. Several years later,
building on the work of social movements, laws such as the NFSA and NREGA have
expanded the idea of citizenship, by detailing justiciable civil, economic and political
rights. These legislations created the possibility of progressive social change and of a
deepening of democracy. In more recent years, the statutory expansion of citizenship
rights has faced a backlash with de jure rights being reigned in, de facto. This reigning
in of rights has been done in part via the use of executive orders of the government.
The Aadhaar based system of implementation served to create technological hurdles in
the process of claiming rights. Thus expansions of rights have come to be
circumscribed with the introduction of a form of precarious and coded citizenship. In
everyday state and society relations in India today, anomic, isolated and coded citizens
interface with a “digitized state.” As a result, demanding accountability in the
functioning of government programs is more complex than it was previously. Yet, this
paper argues that the specter of coded citizenship must be viewed in perspective. Social
movements, deploying old and new tools of contention and demanding probity in the
implementation of laws and government programs, are key to making sense of this
landscape.

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NOTES
1. This statute was renamed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in
2009. It will be referred to as the NREGA in this paper.

2. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009.

3. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act,
2006.

4. The author is grateful to co-panellists at ECSAS, Paris, 2018, for discussions on “coded
citizenship.”

5. Civil Writ Petition, 196/2001, PUCL v. Union of India & Others. The final judgement in this case
was delivered by the Supreme Court in 2017.

6. Kavita Srivastava, Convenor, People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Rajasthan. (Discussion
at Right to Food campaign meeting, December 2017, New Delhi). The roots of this campaign can
be traced to 2001, when the Akaal Sangharsh Samiti (Drought Action Committee) challenged a
lack of government initiative in implementing drought relief works in Rajasthan against the
backdrop of a severe drought. See also Drèze 2004.

7. This refers to the Supreme Court of India located in New Delhi and High Courts of States, often
located in State capitals, but sometimes also located in other prominent cities. In terms of
hierarchy of Judiciary, the “higher courts” mentioned in the text are above District and Sessions
Courts.

8. Writs of mandamus are orders by a superior court to a lower court or public officer to perform
certain duties.

9. Writs of habeas corpus are orders by a superior court to a lower court or detaining authority to
produce a detainee before the court, along with a justification for detention.

10. The term “locus standi” refers to a petitioner or appellant’s legal standing to file a writ
petition.

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11. For the Indian context, Upendra Baxi pointedly uses the term “social action litigation” to
distinguish Indian “judicial activism” form the American tradition of “public interest litigation,”
which has its own specific characteristics (Baxi 1985:108). The term ‘public interest litigation’
however, is popularly used in the Indian context.

12. Baxi (1985:118) highlights that about seventy-five such writ petitions were filed in the higher
courts in India in the 1980-1982 period alone.

13. In the Indian context, the term “fundamental rights” is used for the civil, political, economic
and social rights laid out in Part III of the Constitution of India.

14. In addition to Constitutional law, other legal provisions that were key to the Sanjit Roy case
were, Section 3 of the Rajasthan Famine Relief Works Employees (Exemption from Labour Laws)
Act 1964, and the Minimum Wages Act, 1968. The legal validity of the 1964 Rajasthan Famine
Relief Law was challenged by the petitioner Sanjit Roy.

15. This is a landmark judgement that has been used by activists working on the NREGA in
several cases, including in a social action litigation filed in the High Court of Bihar, at Patna.

16. 2002. Vol 2. SCC 343.

17. Almitra Patel v. Union of India (2000 Vol 3 SCC 575), cf Bhushan 2004.

18. Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha (Upper House), Communist Party of India. D. Raja was
speaking at a public meeting organised by the Right to Food Campaign in Delhi on 15 March 2018.

19. Admittedly, there are many more such examples. Neil Stammers (2003) for instance suggests
that social movements have demonstrated their capacity to “make power visible,” constructing
and applying rights claims in their struggles, in contexts as diverse as the English, American and
French revolutions, the rights framed by the workers’ and socialist movements of nineteenth
century Europe, the rights claimed by anti-colonial movements and by more contemporary “new
social movements” in diverse contexts.

20. Vide Section 3(2), NFSA, 2013. 75 percent of the rural population and 50 percent of the urban
population is covered at an aggregated national level. The Government of India determined the
state wise percentage coverage of population based on the 2011-2012 NSSO Survey on
consumption expenditure (p.2, CAG report 54 of 2015, cf Nayak 2019).

21. Hereafter referred to as the Delhi Survey. The survey was funded by Ambedkar University
Delhi and was conducted by this author with assistance from Shikha Nehra and university
students in 2016. Sample households were randomly selected from beneficiary lists of three fair
price shops (FPS) in each of the four mentioned districts of the National Capital Territory of
Delhi.

22. There are curious exceptions. Aadhaar based identification is not required for the purpose of
making donations to political parties.

23. Notification number 85(E), dated 10 January 2017.

24. Press Information Bureau notification dated 4 August 2017, issued by the Ministry of Home
Affairs. http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=169622 retrieved 1 March 2019.

25. Section 3 of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and other Subsidies, benefits and
services) Act, 2016.

26. This is the allocation for “priority” households under the NFSA. A smaller proportion of
households under the Antyodaya scheme for the poorest of the poor, gets a larger food allocation
per month as per law.

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27. https://thewire.in/rights/right-to-food-campaign-issues-statement-on-jharkhand-
starvation-deaths

28. As per Section 3, NFSA, 2013.

29. NFSA-PDS ration cards issued in Delhi from 2013 onwards were smart cards shaped like credit
cards. The Aadhaar numbers of beneficiaries were linked, or electronically seeded with the cards.
When used with an internet enabled point of sale device, sale of food grain, to an NFSA-PDS
beneficiary could be authenticated via the use of biometrics linked to the beneficiary’s Aadhaar
number. However, this apparent technological fix often proved to be problematic as discussed in
this paper.

30. Civil Writ Petition 2161 of 2017 filed in the High Court of Delhi.

31. www.righttofoodindia.org

32. Campaigns for the Right to Food and the Right to Work are closely linked.

33. The term public interest litigation is being used here interchangeably with Baxi’s term social
action litigation used earlier in this paper.

34. For instance, student groups led by economists Jean Drèze and Reetika Khera have been
conducting surveys on social policy implementation in various parts of India from 2002 onwards.
These surveys have been extensively documented, including in Drèze and Khera 2017.

ABSTRACTS
In the 2000s, “rights-based approaches” to development acquired prominence in national level
social policy in India. From 2005 to 2013, the Indian parliament passed several laws that
effectively created new legal “rights.” This included a national legislation on the “right to work”
under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) enacted in 2005 and a National
Food Security Act (NFSA) on the “right to food” enacted in 2013. In text, rights created under
these legislations expanded the idea of citizenship by defining justiciable claims that could be
made against the state. The enactment of these legislations drew on a history of collective action
and litigation centered on constitutional law and created the possibility of a new, progressive
politics. Yet this positive expansion of citizenship rights has in recent years encountered a
backlash and a de facto reigning in of rights. Part of this erosion of rights has been due to the
Aadhaar based digital technologies using biometrics that were introduced as a key tool of
implementation of social protection programs implemented under laws such as the NREGA and
NFSA. Despite the present context of Aadhaar based erosion of citizenship rights, and the specter
of coded and precarious citizenship, this paper argues that challenges to implementation of
social policy need to be viewed in perspective. The role of social movements has been
fundamental to the emergence of the aforementioned policies and legislations. Moving forward,
the role of civil society actors in demanding probity in implementation of social policy, and in
the reclaiming of citizenship, is critical for ensuring that new rights legislations retain their
progressive potential.

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INDEX
Keywords: citizenship, civil society, law, National Food Security Act (NFSA), rights, social
movements

AUTHOR
NANDINI NAYAK
School of Development Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi, India.

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Information and the Indian State: A

Genealogy
Biswarup Sen

1 The concept of “information” has been at the heart of notions about citizenship in
contemporary societies. For example, in one of the world’s oldest modern democracies
—the United States—the very process of democracy was considered to hinge on the
ability of the nation to count and tabulate the entirety of its citizens (Lepore 2018,
Koopman 2019). As Michel Foucault (1975) seminally argued the passage to modernity
is characterized by the rise of bio-power, that is, by the tendency of the modern state to
think of its citizenry as a “population” that needs to be comprehended and governed by
means of an emerging technology of information. While Foucault’s writings were most
directly concerned with the rise of modern statecraft in Western Europe, it is the
central idea of this paper that the notion of information-based governmentality is also
crucial to an understanding of developing and emerging societies. In what follows, I
offer a genealogy of information and statehood in India by examining how information
as a category was brought into play in successive stages of contemporary Indian
history. The entire “modern” era, I suggest, is one in which information is a key
constituent of state formation, national identity and political philosophy. I begin the
paper with a discussion of the Aadhaar card, a contemporary attempt to uniquely
identify every citizen of the country by means of an informational device. This first
section provides a broad account of the creation of the Aadhaar card and briefly
reviews the controversies it has generated. The purpose of this exercise is not to
provide a comprehensive or definitive account of all the issues at stake here, but rather
to highlight the fact that in this “informational age” it is impossible to think the notion
of citizenship without its informational correlates. It would be wrong, however, to
conclude that such a perspective is entirely novel. In the next three sections of the
paper, I try to provide historical snapshots that illustrate information’s constitutive
role in previous versions of the Indian state. The second section looks at the role
information played in British India and suggests that data collection and management
was crucial to the colonial government as a means of apprehending and ruling its
subjects. The third section examines the nationalist phase in pre-independence India

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and proposes that information animates the freedom struggle by functioning as

speculative category that dreams and thinks the nation. In other words, if the colonial
powers continuously “mined” information for their mission of imperial rule, facts and
figures would be equally valuable in allowing nationalism to conceptualize what the
future free India would approximate to. The fourth section looks at the pre-
liberalization period of postcolonial history to trace how information becomes a state
“good” that is both strictly controlled and sparsely disseminated while at the same
time acting as a spur to a specialized sort of economic activity. In short, between 1947
and 1991, information becomes subsumed under the aegis of statist development.
Finally, in the fifth and concluding section of the paper, I revisit the implications of the
Aadhaar card in particular and of informational governance in general, by placing both
in the context of contemporary political and administrative developments.
2 A note on methodology: this paper is an interpretive exercise that attempts to elucidate
the various meanings and uses of information over a broad sweep of Indian history. It is
based less on primary research than on an analysis of broad trends of governmental
practices and discourses that describe and categorize different stages of informational
statecraft. This analysis is based on academic scholarship on the topic as well as on
journalistic reports and commentaries. The paper’s contribution lies, I hope, in coming
up with a theoretical framework that helps us better understand the central role
played by information in enabling successive moments of the Indian state—the colonial
regime, the nationalist movement, the postcolonial period, and the new millennium.
The account I provide is more genealogy than history in the sense that I don’t provide a
single narrative that seamlessly recounts the development of the idea of information,
but rather demonstrate the specific forms of conjunction between information and
governmentality that are generated in particular social moments or spaces. My analysis
is based on four guiding metaphors which I believe succinctly capture the central role
that information plays in the operations of the social forms I am looking at: the colonial
social formation was characterized by information as extrapolation; for the nationalist
movement information functioned as imagination; in the postcolonial period
information was equivalent to domination; and finally, in the age of Aadhaar
information is societal.

Founding Aadhaar
3 The informational impulse behind the philosophy of governance in contemporary India
is most strikingly illustrated by the Aadhaar card, a document bearing a unique
identification number for every resident of the country. Aadhaar—the word means
“foundation” in many Indian languages—is a biometric device that links each
individual’s identification number to their fingerprints and to their iris scan. Launched
in 2009, the Aadhaar initiative has, according to official claims, enrolled 1.2 billion
individuals in the space of a few years. Even if this figure is not wholly accurate, this
effort is a remarkable achievement given the size and complexity of its constituency.
The creation of the Aadhaar project underlines the Indian state’s turn to an
informational model of society and its firm resolve to use digital technology in the
interests of governance. While such a shift has become highly evident in this new
millennium, this paper will argue that the fusion of information and statecraft has a
long history that spans both the colonial and postcolonial periods.

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4 The roots of the Aadhaar card lie in anxieties concerning national security. After the
1999 Kargil War with Pakistan, a review committee headed by the noted defense expert
K. Subrahmanyam recommended that villagers living in border areas be provided with
an identity card to ensure greater security. The idea was strongly endorsed by the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government then in power, which announced that it would
soon create a “multi-purpose national identity card” to be issued first to villagers living
near the border with Pakistan and then to others as well. The BJP government was
voted out of power in 2004 and succeeded by a less overtly paranoid coalition led by the
Congress party, but the idea of an informational tool that would identify the entire
citizenry of the nation did not die. The rationale for such an initiative had however
changed. As the founding document of the Unique Identification Authority of India put
it, “In India, an inability to prove identity is one of the biggest barriers preventing the
poor from accessing benefits and subsidies. Public as well as private sector agencies
across the country typically require proof of identity before providing individuals with
services. But to date, there remains no nationally accepted, verified identity number
that both residents and agencies can use with “ease and confidence.” (UIDAI 2009) In
other words, a unique identity card for every resident in the country was required not
because it would prevent illegal infiltration across the country’s borders, but because it
would enable efficient delivery of welfare services. Thus was born “AADHAAR,” a
unique identity number, “through which the citizen can claim his/her rights and
entitlements when assured of equal opportunities, as symbolized by the logo, which has
the halo of the Sun on the imprint of a thumb” (Balchand 2010).
5 There was considerable truth in the assertion that India lacked an identity system that
would facilitate the disbursement of welfare goods and services. Thus in 2008, a year
before Aadhaar was launched, only 40 million Indians possessed passports. The
corresponding figures for the PAN card (Permanent Account Number), ration card and
voter ID card were 70 million, 220 million and 500 million respectively (Reach
Project 2017). The identity system was not only fractured, it was also dysfunctional in
the sense that forms of proof that were widely accepted (passports, PAN) were held by
very few, while those held by many—ration cards, NREGA (National Rural Employment
Guarantee Act) cards and voter ID cards—were of limited utility. For example, many
individuals were unable to use these cards outside of the state in which they were
issued. Moreover, both ration cards and NREGA cards were issued to families rather
than individuals, thus making access to these documents very contingent. As the
document laying out the justification for Aadhaar project pointed out, the
consolidation of various forms of identity into one single instrument would have
manifold benefits:

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There are clearly, immense benefits from a mechanism that uniquely

identifies a person, and ensures instant identity verification. The need to
prove identity only once will bring down transaction costs for the poor. A
clear identity number would also transform the delivery of social welfare
programs by making them more inclusive of communities now cut off from
such benefits due to their lack of identification. It would enable the
government to shift from indirect to direct benefits, and help verify whether
the intended beneficiaries actually receive funds/subsidies. A single,
universal identity number will also be transformational in eliminating fraud
and duplicate identities, since individuals will no longer be able to represent
themselves differently to different agencies. This will result in significant
savings to the state exchequer (UIDAI 2009:1).

6 The intention to create a unitary identity system that would be pro-poor made sense in
an environment where roughly 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas and
270 million Indians, roughly one in five, were poor according to World Bank measures.
Further, approximately 400 million of India’s workforce are internal migrants (Reach
Project 2017). Once migrants move from their original place of domicile, it becomes
hard for them to obtain identificatory documents that would enable them to obtain
government services. This migrant population would benefit immensely from a
standardized document that would enable them to access a whole range of services and
resources. An additional advantage of Aadhaar comes from linkages that can be
established between the UID and other governmental instruments thus expediting the
disbursements of due benefits. Take the case of NREGA, the social program that
guarantees rural households a minimum amount of paid work. In Vijayawada, Andhra
Pradesh, the delivery of NREGA wages used to take 20 to 30 days to reach a household.
Government officials in Andhra Pradesh have found that since individuals have been
able to link NREGA to their Aadhaar number, those same wages are now delivered in
three to four days (Reach Project 2017). At the same time, the card would benefit
private industry by helping to create a smoother environment for capital. Nandan
Nilekani, the software leader who was appointed as the first Chairman of the UIDAI,
argued that Aadhaar would enable the average citizen to open a bank account in a
smooth and quick manner thus building a bridge between capital and citizenry. As Visa
card’s Uttam Nayak stated, “If 600 million Aadhaar holders get bank accounts India can
leapfrog from a banking penetration of 24 per cent to the 75 percent common in
developed countries like the US. Simultaneously, we can go from 3 percent
‘electronification’ to 40–50 percent. That is unprecedented in the world”
(Dharmakumar 2013). The case for the Aadhaar card was perhaps most succinctly made
by the founding UIDAI document: “India will be the first country to implement a
biometric-based unique ID system for its residents on such a large scale. The UID will
serve as a universal proof of identity, allowing residents to prove their credentials
anywhere in the country. It will give the government a clear view of India’s population,
enabling it to target and deliver services effectively, achieve greater returns on social
investments, and track money and resource flows across the country” (UIDAI 2009).
7 Aadhaar is not without its vociferous critics. Nikhil Dey, a prominent social activist
described the UDI as, “the opposite of RTI [Right to Information]. We fought all these
years to have government information made public; and now the government will have
access to every act of every citizen and it’ll be kept secret”, while another activist, Usha
Ramanathan, alleges that, “such initiatives exemplify how the Indian state is currently

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collecting biometric data from citizens without a law, simply because no one is
stopping them” (Dharmakumar et al 2013).Again, other RTI activists like Shailesh
Gandhi worry that the Aadhaar project directly hurts the principles and practices of
the Right to Information Act (Gandhi 2017). Several commentators have pointed out the
potential anti-democratic consequences of a unique identity system. For example, Basil
Mathew (2014) observes that India has launched many projects like the Criminal
Tracking Network and Systems (CTNS), the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC)
and the Central Monitoring System (CMS), all of which were established unilaterally
without the permission of Parliament and constitute serious intrusions into the privacy
of citizens. Mathew also points out that in this neoliberal era, the linking of Aadhaar
with private entities constitutes a grave risk of malpractice with data collected for the
purposes of UID leaking out into other hands. In her study of the social life of UID
amongst Delhi’s homeless population, Ursula Rao argues that rather than profiting
from these new technologies, the homeless suffered from their implementation. They
were often handicapped by not having a permanent address, and very often their
bodies were “unreadable” by the machinery of identification. In many cases, the
thumbs of the poor and the aged would not yield a thumbprint, a must for the Aadhaar
card. Rao (2013) argues that biometrics is not a neutral technology, but an emerging
technique that “forms at the conjunction between machines, biological bodies, social
habits, and their contexts” (p. 73). Thus, UID is to be seen as a normalizing technology
that “reads and integrates individuals [who are] sufficiently adjusted to a mainstream
social and biological body” (Rao 2013:77).
8 Aadhaar’s most vocal and persistent critic, Usha Ramanathan (2019), has observed that
“The age of mass surveillance is upon us.” Ramanathan points to the fact that the Home
Ministry has deemed that any information generated, transmitted, received or stored
in any computer resource is of interest to the state. Even more sinisterly, the Indian
government has been conducting secret meetings with representatives of technology
companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, whose use of data goes well beyond the
needs of advertising, and often includes shady linkages with military and defense
establishments. It is with these companies that the Indian government is in discussion
on how to surveil the people of this country. The UID project involves the sharing of
biometric data with companies such as L-1 Solutions which have close links to the CIA.
Equally disturbing is the government’s decision to set up a technology platform to
collect digital chatter in order to create a 360—that is, total—profile of all individuals
who can be classified as internet influencers. UID then is not just a tool for convenient
governance. The manner in which it is used has to do “with the future of freedom
itself” (Ramanathan 2019).
9 It is not the purpose of this paper to adjudicate between competing evaluations of the
Aadhaar initiative. What needs to be noted is UID’s universal appeal at the
governmental level—it was first conceived of in the aftermath of the Kargil war by the
BJP leadership as early as 1999, established by the Congress-led UPA government in
2009, and fully implemented by the BJP government that came to power in 2014. Today,
under the re-elected leadership of Narendra Modi, Aadhaar is an established feature of
the bureaucratic landscape. The only debates surrounding it pertain to the card’s
limits: that is, to what extent the card is necessary for the transaction of services and
business. Thus, in September of 2018, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that Aadhaar is
constitutional in the sense that it does not violate an individual’s right to privacy when
that individual agrees to share biometric data. It further ruled that Aadhaar is

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mandatory for filing income taxes or for obtaining a PAN (permanent account number).
On the other hand, it struck down Article 57 of the Aadhaar Act, as a consequence of
which no private company or entity can seek an Aadhaar card number from any
individual for the purpose of doing business (liveMint 2018).
10 The Aadhaar card is here to stay and that is because the Indian state, as it exists now, is
an entity characterized by a strong commitment to the complete integration of
information technology and governmental practices. From the perspective of this
paper, the Aadhaar project symbolizes the fourth of my guiding metaphors for
conceptualizing such a relationship—information as societal. In this latest iteration, the
concept of information is deemed to be foundational to the very formation of society
itself, an idea that I will explore a little more thoroughly in the concluding part of the
paper.

Information in the Colonial Regime

11 In the autumn of 1858, a young British civil servant named William Herschel, serving at
the time in the north Bengal district of Maldah, entered into a contract for the supply
of road-making material with a local businessman called Rajyadhar Konai. As Konai was
preparing to sign the contractual document in the traditional way—in the upper right
hand corner—Herschel, who had come to “distrust all evidence tendered in Court” and
had come to “despair of any good coming from orders and decisions based on such
slippery facts”, decided on a sudden impulse to ask the contractor to stamp the
contract with a print of his right hand (Sengoopta 2003:57). Thus was born the idea of
the fingerprint, an impression that recorded an individual in the form of unvarying
ridge-pattern data taken from the finger. A successor of Hershcel’s, Edward Henry,
further developed Herschel’s revolutionary procedure, and in 1897 announced a system
of fingerprint classification that “the greatest sceptic would be at once convinced of
identity on being shown the original and duplicate impressions” (Sengoopta 2003:139).
The Bengal system of fingerprinting soon spread all over British India and then back
“home” in England, as well as in the rest of the English-speaking world.
12 The introduction of fingerprinting—still a crucial part of the Aadhaar card’s “operating
system”—as a standard mode of bureaucratic governance points to the crucial role that
was played by information in the constitution of the colonial state. As numerous
scholars have demonstrated, the entire colonial period was marked by a series of
efforts at generating information that would produce a comprehensive “knowledge” of
the territory and its peoples. The entire history of colonialism is dotted with such
epistemological projects: narratives of the conquered nation written by such notable
authors as Alexander Dow (1772; An Enquiry into the State of Bengal), James Mill (1817; The
History of British India)1 and James Tod (1832; Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han); surveys
of the land conducted by geographers like William Lambton (1802; The Great
Trigonometric Survey) and James Rennell (1779; Bengal Atlas) Colin Mckenzie (1799;
Mysore Survey) and Frances Buchanan; the recovery and recodification of native
language, literature, law and lore compiled by Orientalists like Thomas Munro, William
Jones (1796; Institutes of Hindu Law) and N.B. Halhed (1776; A Code of Gentoo Laws ). What
lay behind this unbounded thirst for information? In the words of one distinguished
commentator, such enterprises were undertaken in order “to enable the British to

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classify, categorize, and bound the vast social world that was India so it could be
controlled” (Cohn 1996:4–5).
13 Such an observation stems from a distinctive historiography of colonialism. If
traditional Marxist scholarship analyzed colonialism as a unique mode of production
that arises in “the last stage of capitalism”2 Michel Foucault’s distinctive account of
modernity allows us to read colonialism not only in economic terms, but also as a mode
of governance that imposes knowledge, precepts and rules upon a subject population in
order to make the colonial project viable. In a well-known essay, the anthropologist
David Scott (1995) has argued that we attend to the “political rationalities of colonial
power” that “characterize those ways in which colonial power is organized as an
activity designed to produce effects of rule” (p.193). Following Foucault’s (2001)
observation that “Maybe what is really important for our modernity—that is for our
present—is not so much the statization [etatisation] of society, as the
“governmentalization” of the state” (p.220), Scott (1995) rethinks colonialism in terms
of a “colonial governmentality” that sets up the very terms and logic of societal
discourse “so as to produce not so much extractive-effects on colonial bodies as
governing-effects on colonial conduct” (p.204).
14 The notion of colonial governmentality is indispensable for a full understanding of
colonialism. If governmentality was the defining feature of the modern European state,
it had an even stronger salience in the colonial context. Imposed by military methods
on an alien population, and dedicated to crude extraction and unfair imperial trade, the
colonial state could scarcely turn to notions of sovereignty and the natural order as the
basis for its rule. Its hold and legitimacy could therefore only be established by
reorganizing its human territory by means of the conceptual apparatus and strategic
tactics that embodied the guiding ideas and principles of western modernity. In other
words, the constitutive logic of the colonial state implied that it was “governmental”
from the very moment of its inception. Consequently, the Indian colonial state, first as
Company Bahadur and then as the British Raj, could sustain itself and evolve by
expanding the scope of this governmentality. One can map this endeavor, as
Scott (1995) suggests, by looking at the targets of colonial power—where it was applied
and the means and instrumentalities deployed—as well as the field of its operation—or
as Scott puts it the “zone” it constructs for its functionality (p.193). In other words,
colonial power is used not only at the levels of material goods and human population,
but in a discursive zone as well, since the exercise of colonial governmentality
depended crucially on a ceaseless process of information gathering, information
processing, and information distribution. There is by now a vast amount of literature—
in fields such as historiography, social statistics, mapping, legal studies, literary studies
and aesthetics—that critically examines this process as it unfolded and that ably
demonstrates the creation of a “discourse” that provided the cognitive underpinning
for colonialism as a political and economic phenomenon. To sum up, the colonial
regime needed information as a means of governance of its body of subjects. The gap
between the colonizer and colonized, called for a specific mode of knowledge (of which
anthropology is a prime example) that maintained difference while facilitating a very
specific mode of domination. Whereas Aadhaar collects biometric information in order
to essentially define and capture the “citizen,” the colonial drive for information is
vaster in its scope; it seeks to know “everything” about its subjects if only because it
fears them to be unknowable.

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Information and Nationalist Thought

15 Nationalism in the colonial context is usually thought of as a political process that
challenges the moral authority of colonial rule, argues for self-rule, launches freedom
struggles and eventually succeeds in transforming the colonial state into a free
postcolonial nation. I would like to suggest that nationalism is also an epistemological
project; one that redefines what can or should be known in order to establish a
legitimate nation. Nationalist thought is an exercise in virtuality; it uses information to
imagine a nation that would come to fruition at the moment of independence. Virtual
nationalism dwelt in the realm of the potential, and expressed itself through a series of
blueprints, projections, resolves and resolutions that calculated and calibrated what
was yet to be. Planning, understood as “informed futurity”, that is, an activity that
imagines the future on the basis of information regarding the present was the manifest
form of virtual nationalism as it has just been defined. Not surprisingly then, planning
played an important role in the nationalist movement, and was to play an even more
significant role in the destiny of postcolonial India.
16 The years immediately before 1947 saw a succession of “plans” that were blueprints for
developing the independent nation that was already visible on the horizon. The
Resolution of Fundamental Rights and Economic Programme passed at the Karachi
Congress held in 1931 is perhaps the very first document of this sort. Though not
technically a “plan,” the sentiments expressed in the Resolution certainly assumed
state planning as the fundamental component of the future economy. Thus, it declared
that in the age of Swaraj, “the State shall provide free and compulsory education…
safeguard the interests of industrial workers…protect indigenous industries” and “shall
own or control key industries and services, mineral resources, railways, waterways,
shipping and other means of public transport” (National Planning Committee 1988:31–
33) The Karachi Resolution presaged a flood of similar publications: In 1934, the noted
economist Sir M. M. Visvesvarya published his Planned Economy for India, followed in
1935 by N.S. Subba Rao’s Some Aspects of Economic Planning. At the behest of its President
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, the Congress party constituted a National Planning
Committee under the chairmanship of Jawaharlal Nehru. The Committee, formed in
1938, would release several reports in the next few years, many authored by Nehru
himself. In 1944 a group of industrialists that included two of India’s most famous
business leaders—J.R. D. Tata and G.D. Birla—released “The ‘Bombay’ Plan for India’s
Economic Development.” The same year also saw the publication of a “People’s Plan”
authored by the radical humanist and ex-communist M.N. Roy on behalf of the Indian
Federation of Labour. In 1945, the government of India issued two documents—the
“Second Report on Reconstruction Planning” and the “Industrial Policy Statement”—
both of which outlined a vision for post-war India. Finally, a “Gandhian Plan” for
India (1949), written by S.N. Aggarwal, was the last such anticipatory document to come
out before planning became a reality in the early fifties with the establishment of the
Planning Commission and the launching of the First Five Year Plan.
17 These proposals represented very different constituencies of the emerging nation and
one would expect them to have widely divergent prescriptions for development and
growth. But in spite of these differences, all these plans shared a common vision. In his
analysis of the national postcolonial state, the eminent postcolonial theorist Partha

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Chatterjee (1993) points out that planning appeared first and foremost as a form of
determining state policy. Executed by “experts,” planning “emerged as a crucial
instrumental modality by which the state would determine the material allocation of
productive resources within the nation: a modality of political power constituted
outside the immediate political power itself.” What this implies is that “a
developmental ideology…was a constituent part of the self-definition of the
postcolonial ideology” (pp.202–203).3 I would supplement Chatterjee’s observations by
pointing out that while planning is clearly the key instrument for a “developmental
ideology” it is at the same time the ground for the emergence of an informational
order. Consider the following definition of planning put forward by a sub-committee of
the National Planning Committee:

What is planning? Planning under a democratic system may be defined as

the technical co-ordination, by disinterested experts, of consumption,
production, investment, trade and income distribution in accordance with
social objectives set by bodies representative of the nation. Such planning is
not only to be considered from the point of view of economics and the
raising of the standard of living, but must include cultural and spiritual
values and the human side of life (National Planning Committee 1988:51).

Defining planning as an activity consisting of “technical co-ordination, by disinterested

experts” may be indicative of the emergent middle-class “bourgeois” ideology that
would come to dominate Nehruvian India; but at the same time such a vision unleashes
an informational program that comes to strongly influence and characterize the nature
of the postcolonial formation. In other words, the idea of planning is inconceivable
without the idea of information, and at the same time the project of planning would, as
I discuss in the next section, be directly responsible for India’s information revolution.
18 Most of the notable nationalist leaders were wholeheartedly committed to the idea of
planning. Jawaharlal Nehru, the face of Indian politics after Gandhi, was the central
figure in this respect. In a note directed at his fellow member on the National Planning
Committee he wrote:

To realize the social objectives, the state has to plan through its
representatives…This planning will deal with production, distribution,
consumption, investment, trade, income, social services and the many other
forms of national activity which act and react on each other. Briefly put,
planning aims at the raising of the material and cultural standard of living of
the people as a whole (Gopal 1980:306).

In other words, Nehru was calling for a great informational exercise that would cognize
every realm of the economy and society in order to predict and produce the India that
was to come. Such a stance was not restricted to Nehru; his great rival in the Congress
party, Subhas Bose, announced that “when we have a national government for the
whole country, one of the first things we shall have to do is to appoint a National
Planning Commission for the whole country” (Bose 1962:54). This rhetoric is unchanged
almost a hundred years later—the Aadhaar card according to an advisory committee set
up at the time of its launch is characterized by an “anytime, anywhere, anyhow”
authentication ability that “will provide the user universality of usage across service
providers, across the country” (Aadhaar, Communicating to a Billion, 2010). For the
pre-Independence Congress party and the Aadhaar Advisory Committee alike,

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information gathering and management are the key to economic development and to
social progress.
19 I want to conclude this section by considering the case of P.C. Mahalanobis, the
principal architect of the Second Five-Year Plan (1951-1961) and perhaps the single
most influential figure in the history of Indian economic planning. Mahalanobis was a
statistician of international repute and had been responsible for the founding of the
Indian Statistical Institute in 1932, as well as the reputed statistical journal Samkhya,
which was founded in 1933. Like Bose and Nehru, Mahalanobis was yet another key
mid-century figure who believed in the essential unity of science and planning. For him
statistics was “essentially an applied science” that’s “aim is to reach a decision, on a
probabilistic basis, on available evidence” (Mahalanobis 1950:210). This applied science
was therefore at the very heart of planning. In an address to the American Statistical
Association, Mahalanobis drew attention to the governmental benefits of statistics: “It
had its origin in the counting of men or cattle…the very word statistics shows its
connection with ‘statecraft’.” In as much “It is essential, in underdeveloped countries
to make statistics purposive” (Mahalanobis 1965:45–46). Not only did Mahalanobis
found the discipline of statistics in India, in his later role as the chief architect of the
Second Five Year Plan he was instrumental in setting the tone of India’s policy-making
for the next three decades. The primary objective of the Plan was to raise the level of
living in the country by means of “rapid industrialization with particular emphasis on
the development of basic and heavy industries” (Second Five Year Plan). The bias
toward technology would become evident in the push for developing industries like
coal, electricity, iron and steel, and chemicals. There was early recognition on the part
of Mahalanobis and others that information technology was a resource as important as
any of the “heavy” industries. Thus, the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), under
Mahalanobis, built the country’s first analog computer in the early 1950s. 4 Recognizing
the need for more advanced technology, Mahalanobis formed a small computer group
at the ISI and ordered a computer from the British Tabulating Machines (BTM) which
was at the time marketing keypunch machines, sorters and mechanical calculators in
India. BTM agreed to sell a computer to the ISI in 1954, though without any technical
support. The ISI was to install and maintain the machine using its own scientists and
engineers. The ISI sent two of its scientists to England to learn the basics of this HEC‐
2M (Hollerith Electronic Computer Model 2M) computer. The computer arrived in
Kolkata in July 1955 and it started working in August 1955 (Rajaraman 2012).
Mahalanobis was a key figure in that he forged the path between a mathematical
approach to information processing and a computational one. Along with Bose and
Nehru he represents that strain of nationalism for which information gathering and
processing is an integral part of creating a nation.

Information in the Post-Colonial State

20 In this section, I examine the role that information played in the years after
Independence as the Indian state sought to define and develop a just-born nation. This
postcolonial period was characterized by two developments.5 The first was a possessive
attitude and a consequential safeguarding of information relating to matters of state.
This led to a practice of hoarding and locking up information and disseminating it in
small doses, often in the shape of propaganda. Secondly, the Indian government began

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to acknowledge the growing role information and information technology was

beginning to play in the global economy and started taking discreet measures that
would enable Indian industry to master and then generate revenue in this sector.
21 The nature of the Indian social formation in the period 1947-1991 determined the
state’s stance towards communication and information. First, the Indian state was
firmly committed to a socialist path to development. This meant that the state retained
ownership of crucial capital-intensive sectors like oil, steel, railways, defense
equipment and so on. In particular, the state assumed control over both broadcasting
and telecommunications, including telephony. For example, not only were telephone
lines and exchanges under governmental control, but, the handsets themselves were
manufactured by a public sector company. Secondly, a paternalistic attitude towards
the masses—derived partly from colonial antecedents and partly from still prevalent
feudal hierarchies of caste, class and status—meant that communication and
information were thought of as the exclusive property of the state, to be disseminated
in a manner that could only be determined by officialdom. Thirdly, the developmental
bias of this period meant that attitudes towards communication and information were
marked by extreme frugality. Thus Nehru—whose personal whimsy often translated
into national policy—saw television as a luxury meant only for the affluent and thus did
little to encourage its growth (Majumdar and Mehta 2012). As a result, television was
inordinately late coming to India, and even during the first two decades after it was
introduced in 1969, television broadcasting remained both skeletal and rudimentary.
22 The notion that information and communication needed be under the purview of the
state has a long history in the Indian context. As the famous Indian Telegraph Act of
1885 announced quite unequivocally, “Within [India] the Central Government shall
have the exclusive privilege of establishing, maintaining and working telegraphs” (The
Indian Telegraph Act 1885:36). The scope of the government’s involvement with
information and communication was necessarily enlarged with the advent of radio
broadcasting. Although the very first radio broadcasts (1927) in India were made by the
privately-owned Indian Broadcasting Company, the venture failed and the colonial
government took over the role of broadcasting with the formation of the Indian
Broadcasting Service in 1932. The IBS was renamed All India Radio (1936) and was then
placed under a separate Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. In short, both
interpersonal communication (by means of post, telegraph and telephone) as well as
mass communications (radio, television) were thought of as informational domains that
need to be subsumed within the state; either by state ownership of channels of
distribution as in the case of the post, telegraph or telephone, or by control over both
content and channel in the case of radio and television. In spite of two notable
exceptions—the press and the Bollywood film industry which were both privately
financed and subject to the mildest of censorship—it is still legitimate to describe this
period as one in which information (and its communication) was thought of primarily
in statist terms.
23 To sum up, in the period 1947-1991, the Indian state’s relationship to information was
highly proprietary. Such a top-down informational paradigm can be dubbed as “pre-
modern” in the sense that it did not promote, and often actively blocked, the
continuous flow of information between private entities that was characteristic of all
advanced capitalist societies. Even while the Indian state strictly controlled both the

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production and distribution of information, it would also begin to embrace the idea of
the information age.
24 India’s entry into the digital era can be said to have begun in January of 1962, when the
Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, inaugurated the TIFRAC, an indigenously
manufactured first-generation mainframe computer that was meant to boost the
nation’s scientific capabilities (Deccan Herald 2010). Named after the prestigious
research institution in which it was housed, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Automatic Calculator, which had been many years in the making, would remain in
operation for a mere two years. Its impact on Indian society, however, was incalculable
insofar as it announced the dawning of a new era that would be based on information.
In the immediate aftermath of Independence, state economy policy was heavily biased
in favor of domestic industry. At the same time, however, the Indian state’s
relationship with global capital was far less amicable. Thus, the Industrial Policy
Resolution of 1948, that set the tone for the country’s financial philosophy, held that
foreign investment had to be carefully regulated in the national interest and that
“majority interest in ownership and effective control should always be in Indian hands”
(p. 95) In other words, the postcolonial state’s stance towards capital in general was
both complex and contradictory: abetting and colluding with domestic capital on the
one hand, and hostile and intransigent to global capital on the other.
25 An analysis of India’s information sector in the Nehruvian period complicates this tidy
dichotomy. As even a cursory glance at the development of the computer industry will
show, contrary to the received wisdom, the postcolonial state was establishing ties with
global capital even at the height of the autarkic period. The post TIFRAC period is
marked by successive events that demonstrate how the digital domain provides a site
for the postcolonial state’s increasing engagement with global capital: the allowing of
software export, the relaxation of import restrictions, the creation of Special Economic
Zones (SEZ), the institution of body shopping, the opening of doors for foreign
multinationals, and finally the wholesale integration of the software industry into the
global marketplace. In short, the saga of the information sector in Nehruvian
postcolonial India both enacts and predicts the large-scale changes brought about by
liberalization.
26 The trajectory of the computer industry in the period 1967-1978 can be seen as an
ambiguous period in which the principles of Nehruvian postcoloniality were being both
strengthened and diluted at the same time. The establishment of the Electronics
Commission of India Limited (ECIL, est. 1970), an organization whose goal was to
develop an indigenous computer industry, as well as the passage of strict foreign
exchange laws that limited the amount of external capital that would be allowed into
the country FERA were in keeping with the state’s avowed mission to create a self-
sufficient society based on socialistic principles. At the same time, however, there was a
realization that these very principles had to be compromised if India was to earn the
revenue needed to address its balance of payment problems. The most interesting
development in this regard was the setting up of export processing zones (EPZ) that
would not be subject to the usual tariffs and duties levied on any sort of international
trade. The first such EPZ was opened in 1965 in Kandla, a port town in the state of
Gujarat. However, it is the Santa Cruz Electronics Export Processing Zone (SEEPZ),
located in Andheri East, Mumbai, which is of more relevance to this present discussion.
SEEPZ was set up in 1973 as single-product Export Processing Zone that would

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exclusively manufacture and export electronic items, with the objective “of (a)
accelerating the progress of electronics manufacturing in India and (b) to take
advantage of the growing electronics world market” (Special Economic Zone 2015).
27 The SEEPZ scheme would be a small but promising way to step up the export sector.
The announcement of the scheme had the effect of enticing the giant US company
Burroughs, which then ranked amongst the top 10 computer companies in the world, to
enter India and set up a joint venture with the fledgling Tata Consulting Services. The
collaboration with Burroughs gave India’s software professionals an intimate
knowledge of global business practices and would thus serve as a springboard for the
growth of the entire software industry. In the words of one commentator, “The Indian
software saga...began in SEEPZ Mumbai” (Aggarwal 2006:4533).
28 The Export Processing Zone model gave birth to the phenomenon known, somewhat
notoriously, as “bodyshopping”, which involved the practice of sending software
personnel to the US, UK and other countries to work at onsite on temporary projects.
Bodyshopping dominated the industry in the 1980s, but would soon be replaced by
offshoring—the implementation of IT services, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO),
Software Products and Engineering services from within India would soon become the
main engine for the remarkable growth of the Indian industry. Buoyed by the revenues
generated by offshoring (also known as outsourcing), Indian software exports increased
from EUR 5.93 billion in 2003-2004 to EUR 20.20 billion in 2008-2009, and the industry
saw an astonishing growth rate of almost 25 percent (Malik 2011).
29 I want to end this section by briefly mentioning two state initiatives—the New
Computer and Software Policies of 1984 and 1986, and the decision to set up of software
technology parks (STPs) in 1990—that further confirm the thesis that the information
sector was the site where the state “rehearsed” its turn to the free market before the
liberalization of 1991. The opening up of the computer industry would be accelerated
by the passage of two policy enactments: The New Computer Policy (NCP) of 1984 and a
policy on software export passed in 1986. The NCP employed a strategy of “flood in,
flood out” (Subramanium 2006:380)—flood the nation with imports and cause a larger
flood of software exports—and eased the availability of computers in India by reducing
the software import tariffs from 100 percent to 60 percent. Within a year of its
implementation, computer production grew by 100 percent, while prices fell by 50
percent. Software exports too began to increase, and recognizing its huge potential, the
government also introduced a policy on computer software export, development and
training, the objective of which was to “promote software exports to take a quantum
jump and capture a sizable share in the international market” (Sharma 2009:140).
30 The last development of note that occurred in the computer/software industry before
liberalization was the establishment of Software Technology Parks, which were duty-
free privately managed enterprises that could attract investments and boost exports in
the software industry. The first STPs were established in Bangalore, Pune and
Bhubenswar in 1990 and within two decades there were as many as 47 such centers
operating across the country (Vaidyanathan 2008:288). As the noted economist Pulapre
Balakrishnan (2006) has observed, STPs “were to radically transform the environment
for software production in India and thus the Indian IT industry. The STP, by providing
an exclusive state-of-the-art physical site for software production, especially access to
high-speed communication channels, enabled the Indian IT industry to sidestep the
infra-structure constraint that is stoically faced by the rest of India's manufacturing

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sector…The rise of the offshore model reflected the rising confidence in the Indian
software firm worldwide” (p.3869).
31 There is a common thread running through the establishment of Special Economic
Zones, the passage of the minicomputer and New Computer policies, and the
introduction of Software Technology Parks. All these instances collectively symbolize
the information sector’s unique role in mediating the relationship between the
postcolonial state and capitalist democracy. Information stood at the fault line between
two drives, one demanding that the country be dedicated to a socialist path that would
make the nation autonomous with regard to the world capitalist order, and a second
that called for the adoption of current technological goods and practices in order to
steer the nation into modernity. The second tendency would eventually win out, and
the postcolonial state’s gradual acknowledgement that information was an economic
“good” had the effect of loosening its proprietary stance. This would, in no small
measure prepare the way for economic liberalization and the beginning of the current
era of informational governance.

Conclusion
32 As the discussion above has demonstrated, the relationship between information and
the state in India has gone through four distinct stages. Under British colonial rule,
information was continuously extracted from the populace, much in the same way as
raw materials and other resources, in order to properly cognize the body politic in the
interests of imperial rule and hopefully turn the population into loyal subjects. For the
nationalist movement that arose at the end of the nineteenth century, information was
an equally prized object, but its role was quite different. Information would help to
dream and plan the nation that was incoming, it was therefore the means to visualize
the citizen of tomorrow in a free India. With Independence, information became the
property of the State, its possession and distribution becoming a matter of great
national importance. Concurrently however, the new information order dissolved the
State’s commitment to autarky and helped to integrate India into the new global
economy that was beginning to take place. The present situation is one in which the
primacy of information in the realm of both economics and governance are taken for
granted. As Manuel Castells (2009) has argued in his seminal writings on the topic,
“Informationalism is the technological paradigm that constitutes the material basis of
early 21st century societies” (p.9). The Aadhaar card project weaves together the new
conceptions of state, citizenship, information and governance that characterize
contemporary Indian politics.
33 We can achieve a fuller and deeper understanding of this philosophical and political
paradigm by placing the Aadhaar project alongside similar initiatives like the National
Register of Citizens (NRC). The NRC is, in the words of the Office of the Registrar
General & Census Commissioner, India (2019) “a register of usual residents of the
country” whose objective is to provide a comprehensive database of every resident
using demographic and biometric particulars. The creation of the NRC was mandated
by the Citizenship Act of 1955 (and by its 2003 amendment) but the initiative was not
implemented anywhere until under a Supreme Court order of 2013, the state of Assam
was asked to compile such a register. The final list of the state’s 33 million inhabitants
was released in August 2019, with nearly 2 million residents having failed to make the

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list. Two crucial observations must be made here. First, the central idea behind the NRC
—that every citizen of the nation needs to be enumerated and inscribed—is the same
one that animates the Aadhaar project. Taken together, the two projects embody the
belief that information is societal, meaning not only that society is to be founded on a
bedrock of data but also that social being can only be enacted through informational
devices and processes. Thus, if the NRC provides a “base of data” upon which the nation
stands, the Aadhaar card symbolizes how day to day transactional life is possible only
with the employment of informational tools.
34 Secondly, the NRC (and its adjunct, the recently passed Citizenship Amendment Act or
CAA) is a striking illustration of how an abstract informational philosophy of
citizenship can be put to use in the context of identity politics. Even though the idea of
a national register of citizens was implicit in all pronouncements about Indian
citizenship, the only time an actual register was created was immediately after the 1951
census. Quite remarkably, between that year and the release of an NCR report in the
state of Assam in August 2019, there was no attempt to revive the idea of an NCR. The
Indian state was quite content, it appears, to rule and govern, without any explicit
knowledge of its subjects. It is only in the aftermath of the Aadhaar initiative that the
NRC would be revived for one singular case—Assam. Ever since the province of Assam
was created in the years following the Mutiny it has been a contested terrain in terms
of identity and ethnic politics (Chakravarti 2019). One major source of conflict was
migration from neighboring areas, an issue which resulted in the Assam Movement of
1979 demanding expulsion of “illegals.” It is therefore no coincidence that in the de-
secularized climate of the new millennium the Supreme Court of India responded to
two writ petitions filed by non-governmental organizations from Assam and ordered
the state and central governments to update the NRC in accordance with the
Citizenship Act of 1955 and the (amended) Citizenship Rules of 2003. The court’s intent
here was to ensure that such “illegals”, many of whom came from the minority
community, would both be identified and lose their legitimacy as denizens of the land.
As Ranjit Samaddar (2018) aptly observes, “Citizenship and statelessness have never
been so linked as they are today.” After two rounds of publication of drafts of the
register, a partial one on December 31, 2017 and a final draft on July 30, 2018, the final
list was published on August 31, 2019, with 1.9 million inhabitants of the state being
found wanting with valid documentation required to establish their identities.
(Barbora 2019). Given that half of this undocumented population turned out to be
Hindus, the BJP government reacted rapidly by passing the Citizenship Amendment Act
that granted legal status to members of the Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Parsi or Christian
community from the three neighboring countries of Bangladesh, Pakistan and
Afghanistan who had sought refuge in India. At the time of writing, India is being
convulsed by massive protests against the CAA that have elicited a very brutal response
from the current government in a striking proof of the proposition that information
can get entangled with the most uncivil forms of political conflicts. Designed to account
for every citizen of India and to provide each constituent of the nation with a unique
biometric profile, projects like the Aadhaar card and the NCR offer a new foundation
for citizenship. Though it is beyond the scope of this paper, such schemes represent the
convergence between state and capital to reassemble governance around notions of
access, information, and digital consumerism. In other words, the present moment is
witnessing a push to construct a new citizen-subject who will function as a node within
an emergent ecology of information.

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 46

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NOTES
1. Mill’s volume was less an example of information-gathering than of creating an ideological
portrait of British India. Mill himself never visited India, and wrote his book by examining
correspondence stored in the India Office in London. I owe this insight to an anonymous reviewer
for this paper.
2. A representative example of the latter approach is the Marxist historian Jairus Banaji’s claim
that “colonialism must be understood in terms of a specific mode of production, neither feudal or
capitalist, though ‘resembling’ both at different levels” (1972). It ought to be pointed out that
such formulations were driven by the need to plot the Indian formation within the grid of
historical materialism in order to determine the correct political strategy for the moment.
3. David Ludden (1992) has argued persuasively that even the colonial state can be thought of as a
“development regime” committed to the idea of state-guided progress for the entire citizenry.
4. In 1955, the Indian Statistical Institute imported India’s first digital computer, an HEC-2M
machine manufactured by the British Tabulating Machine Company. Two years earlier,
researchers at the ISI had built the country’s first analog computer (Sinha 2012).
5. I am using “postcolonial” to designate the period 1947–1991. This may seem arbitrary and even
idiosyncratic. I lack the space to argue for this use, but will merely say that for me the category
of postcoloniality becomes less and less useful as we go beyond liberalization. I prefer to describe
(and analyze) 1991to the present as contemporary rather than postcolonial.

ABSTRACTS
The category of information has been at the heart of notions about citizenship and governance in
all modern societies. This paper constructs a genealogy of information and statehood in India by

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examining how information as a governing idea was brought into play in successive stages of
contemporary Indian history. This first section provides a broad account of the creation of the
Aadhaar card project—that attempts to uniquely identify every citizen in the country—and
briefly reviews the controversies it has generated. The second portion of the paper provides
historical snapshots that illustrate information’s constitutive role in previous versions of the
Indian state. Thus, the second section looks at the role information played in constituting
colonial government, while the next section examines the nationalist phase in pre-independence
India to suggest that information functioned as speculative category that allowed freedom
fighters to dream and think the nation. In the fourth section I look at the pre-liberalization
period of postcolonial history to trace how information becomes a state “good” that is both
strictly controlled and sparsely disseminated while at the same time acting as a spur to a
specialized sort of economic activity. Finally, in the fifth and concluding section of the paper, I
analyze information’s role in emerging India by revisiting the implications of the Aadhaar card in
particular and of informational governance in general, by placing both in the context of
contemporary political and administrative developments like the National Population Register
and the Citizenship Amendment Act.

INDEX
Keywords: information, Aadhaar, India, genealogy, postcolonial

AUTHOR
BISWARUP SEN
University of Oregon

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Crafting “Integrity”: The

Implications of Authentication
through Unique Identification
Databases
S. Shakthi

Introduction1
1 With the aim of enrolling every Indian resident, the Aadhaar program, overseen by the
Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), has been promoted in official
discourse as a transformative tool for eliminating “duplicates and fake identities” and
ensuring transparency in welfare and service provision to authenticated individuals. 2
Nandan Nilekani, widely regarded as the architect of Aadhaar, has declared that the
national biometric-based identification scheme has saved the Indian government $9
billion in “fraud and wastage.”3 This emphasis on ensuring authenticity was similarly
deployed three years before the creation of the UIDAI and four years before the first
Aadhaar number was issued, in another Indian unique identification project with
strong connections to Aadhaar. Known as the National Skills Registry (NSR), this
database, launched in 2006 by the Indian information technology (IT) industry’s
employer association, NASSCOM,4 utilizes biometric identification to create individual
profiles of current and potential IT employees.
2 With estimated annual revenue of over 123 billion GBP (NASSCOM 2018), the Indian IT
industry is largely populated by college-educated professionals with relatively
substantial salaries, middle-class lifestyles, and opportunities to travel and work
abroad.5 An exploration of practices and policies in the IT industry might therefore
appear somewhat removed from an analysis of Aadhaar, which lays particular emphasis
on the efficient delivery of welfare schemes and subsidies targeted at the poor
(Nilekani and Shah 2015). Yet, even a relatively superficial investigation reveals a
number of material connections between the IT industry and the Aadhaar program.

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Perhaps the most obvious is Nilekani himself. Nilekani, the first Chairman of the UIDAI,
is one of India’s most famous IT entrepreneurs, having co-founded the country’s
second-largest IT firm, Infosys. The expansion of Aadhaar’s focus towards linking a
range of public and private services to this unique identification number has also
resulted in the creation of the Indian Software Products Industry Round Table, or
iSPIRT. This entity, which describes itself as a think tank, is primarily staffed by former
members of NASSCOM, and provides technological tools for the incorporation of
Aadhaar into the provision of these services, as well as lobbying on behalf of businesses
that utilize Aadhaar (Thaker 2018).6
3 Beyond these direct linkages, strong parallels to the Aadhaar program can be seen in
the proliferation of the NSR. This IT employee database and its vision of safeguarding
authenticity have been endorsed by Nilekani in his 2014 book, Rebooting India, co-
written with another key Aadhaar engineer, Viral Shah (Nilekani and Shah 2015:252). 7
More broadly, in its attempt to re-invent itself as a “start-up state” (Nair 2019), the
government’s increasing reliance on neoliberal techniques of governance in the pursuit
of its development agenda reminds us that “the private sector often provides the model
for efficiency” (Rao and Nair 2019:471) for state practice.
4 This paper presents an analysis of the NSR, which, operated by the country’s largest
private-sector employer, provides a useful comparative framework for evaluating the
trajectory and scope of Aadhaar. In particular, by focusing on the industry’s attempt at
disciplining its workforce through the use of biopower (Foucault 1978), this paper
recalls Foucauldian arguments in existing scholarship on the application of Aadhaar in
managing targeted populations (Chaudhuri and König 2018; Maringanti 2009;
Sarkar 2014). While the surveillance of employees in both conspicuous and subtle ways
is commonplace in the industry (Upadhya and Vasavi 2006), I argue that this has been
reinforced by the discourse of “integrity” that is frequently deployed to manage
employees. The NSR, as a centralized repository of employees’ personal, professional
and biometric information, becomes a crucial site of enforcing “integrity,” allowing
companies to not only mark compliant employees as legitimate, but to also potentially
contain acts of resistance.
5 In the remainder of this paper, I contextualize the study by drawing from literature on
surveillance, particularly as a corporate disciplining technique, and the growing body
of scholarship on identification systems, citizenship and civil liberties in India. I also
provide an overview of the Indian IT industry, the NSR, and the methods used for this
study. I then interrogate the surveillance culture of the IT industry and analyze
“integrity,” or compliance with corporate policies, as a disciplining strategy. Placing
the NSR within this framework, I highlight the similarities of the NSR with Aadhaar,
while also exploring the emergence of the “NSR blacklist,” a rumored compilation of
deviant employees in the NSR visible only to employers. In deconstructing the myth-
making, misconceptions and self-disciplining generated by the existence of the NSR, I
comment on Aadhaar’s implications for safeguarding individual privacy, the power of
private players under neoliberal capitalism and the increasing ubiquity of surveillance
strategies in everyday practices.

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Situating Corporate Surveillance and Unique

Identification Databases
6 This empirical study of the NSR and its socio-political implications draws on the rich
body of scholarship on techno-social identities (Amoore 2006; Lyon 2009, 2001;
Rose 1999). This research argues that biometric verification systems, operating in the
interest of both public agencies and private capital, assume that identity is located
within a stable body that can be easily legitimated (Amoore 2006). In the process, these
programs create fixed categories that particularly favor state interests over citizen
needs (Lyon 2009). Rose (1999) highlights the potential for these systems to result in
modes of exclusion that are often predicated on existing lines of identity and
difference.8 Moreover, Rose addresses the scope of surveillance through unique
identification. In the “securitization of identity,” as Rose argues, the objective is not to
administer constant surveillance, but to provide “ conditional access to circuits of
consumption and civility” (Rose 1999:243). Much of this work builds on, critiques and
develops Foucault’s influential formulations on governmentality and bio-power
(Foucault 1991, 1978). Foucault’s theory of governmentality, or the institutional
governance of a population through strategies that aim to foster a culture of self-
discipline, has provided an important conceptual framework for unpacking
surveillance mechanisms. Similarly, the “anatomo-politics” (Foucault 1978) of bio-
power—aimed at influencing individual behavior by operating on and through
biological characteristics of discrete bodies—allows for further theorization on
biometrics as a tool for enforcing productivity through compliance.
7 This paper also adds to the diverse body of literature on corporate strategies for
controlling and managing employees (Freeman 2000; Kunda 1992; Ong 1987;
Salzinger 2000; Upadhya and Vasavi 2006). Ong (1987), in her classic study of female
factory workers in Malaysia, found that these women were often referred to as “factory
daughters,” emphasizing their subordinate status to paternalistic male managers while
simultaneously desexualizing them.9 In his study of software engineers in Silicon
Valley, Kunda (1992) has identified how “normative control” is deployed to maximize
productivity. Kunda (1992) defines this as “the desire to bind employees’ hearts and
minds to the corporate interest” (p.217). This normative control is seen in
decentralized practices that encourage employees themselves to be invested in this
process. He notes that alongside these modes of normative control, “utilitarian”
methods based on vertical operations of power are also prevalent. Moreover, Kunda has
observed that the construction of subjectivities within Silicon Valley occurs through
both the acceptance and the contestation of these power structures, as employees do
not unquestioningly imbibe this logic of control. In their study of the Indian IT
industry, Upadhya and Vasavi (2006) found a similar blending of extreme “panoptical”
systems of control with subjective management techniques, with companies sometimes
attempting to create a “fun” atmosphere in order to mask the rigidity, monotony and
stress of their work processes.
8 Turning to unique identification as a site of analysis, a robust body of literature has
emerged in recent years in response to the state’s adoption of biometric-based systems
of verification. Much of this scholarship has emphasized the shift in state-subject
relations that both arises from and has contributed to the implementation of Aadhaar
(Abraham 2018; Chaudhuri and König 2018; Maringanti 2009; Rao and Nair 2019;

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Shukla 2010). The state’s framing of its operations in the language of the market has led
to a “bureaucratic—technocratic—entrepreneurial model of development” (Rao and
Nair 2019:474) that closely resembles the structures of the service industry. Within this
discourse, residents are framed as “customers” who avail of the government’s services,
which are delivered partly in collaboration with private sector resources (Chaudhuri
and König 2018:127–128). The transactional nature of Aadhaar, where the state has
emerged as a “mediator and facilitator” of the market (Shukla 2010:31), has profound
implications for residents’ interactions with state apparatus.
9 This literature also explores the intended and material operation of Aadhaar.
Sarkar (2014) delineates the principles behind the program, arguing that its binary
distinction between legitimate applicants for entitlements and purported pretenders
results in the formulation of a “static” system that leaves little room for unforeseen
deviations from this model. Simultaneously, as other studies have highlighted
(Nair 2018; Rao 2013), a number of contradictions have become visible in the program’s
actual implementation, as systems of marginality and exclusion find continuities in its
execution.
10 The potential for Aadhaar to be utilized by the state as a mode of surveillance has also
been commented on in recent scholarship (Khera 2019; Ramanathan 2010). This
research delves into the concept of data “convergence” (Ramanathan 2010). It argues
that Aadhaar, once “seeded” into a number of other public and private databases,
would allow for privacy infringement and individual profiling, with consequences for
those posing resistance to the state.10 In the context of South Africa’s unique
identification system, HANIS, Breckenridge (2005) has similarly discussed the privacy-
related consequences of “data-creep,” or the ability of a biometric-based identification
program to enable the building of individual resident profiles.
11 Moreover, a growing body of literature has utilized ethnographic methods to
interrogate the social meanings of surveillance. Prasad-Aleyamma (2018) notes that
technology utilized for biometric identification is not merely a transformative
surveillance mechanism. Rather, surveillance through technology must also be
conceptualized as a consequence of complex and variegated socio-political strategies.
This research also addresses the performativity of negotiations with biometrics
(Rao 2018; Solanki 2019). Solanki (2019), in his study of the role of biometric
identification in evaluating government employees in a North Indian state, notes that
attempts at managing this workforce result instead in the “performance of
management.” Rao’s (2018) analysis of two disparate physical sites that utilize
biometric identification reveals that contrary to their portrayal as a means of fixing
identities, biometric systems are open to manipulation, including by those they are
meant to control and categorize. This paper contributes to this scholarship by
providing a situated analysis of an industry-specific surveillance mechanism, using
ethnographic methods to highlight the constructed nature of surveillance itself.

Field Site and Methodology

12 The birth of the Indian IT industry can be traced to the early 1970s, when the central
government first began to promote software exports and the inclusion of computer
science courses in higher education institutions (Heeks 1996). In 1984, the government
under then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi released a “Computer Policy” that officially

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 54

recognized software as an industry (Parthasarathy 2005), with subsequent policies

further easing restrictions for investors. The launch of the Software Technology Parks
of India (STPI) in 1991—a government organization that provides IT companies with
well-equipped physical spaces for conducting business—allowed foreign companies to
offshore their software and services requirements directly to Indian sites, while
domestic companies also benefited from the availability of suitable infrastructure
(Upadhya and Vasavi 2006). Combined with the economic reforms of the 1990s, 11 which
significantly reduced barriers to the inflow of foreign capital, and the availability of a
technically-educated, relatively cheap, English-speaking labor force, the path was set
for the rapid growth of the industry.
13 The IT industry has demonstrated a particular reliance on foreign clients
(Chandrasekhar 2005; Kumar 2005). As Patibandla, Kapur and Petersen (2000) have
argued, the very foundation of the industry was built on exports, which has deeply
influenced its institutional growth. Moreover, the industry has received considerable
state support since its inception, with both the central and state governments
providing numerous incentives to encourage its expansion. In turn, the industry has
demonstrated its ability to exert influence over policymaking (Parthasarathy 2005);
NASSCOM which was founded in 1988, played a key role in establishing the STPI
(Upadhya and Vasavi 2006).
14 Software and services companies have begun to contribute significantly to Chennai’s
economy in recent years, operating alongside more established industries such as
automobile and electronics manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services. As one of
India’s largest IT centers and the capital of the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu,
Chennai has witnessed rapid urban development over the last decade to accommodate
and facilitate the expansion of the industry. Most major Indian and foreign companies
operating in India are represented in sprawling, self-contained office complexes and IT
parks dotted throughout the city. Tamil Nadu has nearly 600 engineering colleges, with
around 250,000 new students entering these institutions every year (Government of
Tamil Nadu 2015). There are also several arts and science colleges that feed into the
industry. The availability of a large pool of potential employees can be viewed as a
major reason for the expansion of the IT industry in the city.
15 This paper derives from a broader research project that analyzed the construction of
middle-class subjectivities through employment in Chennai’s IT industry. Between 2015
and 2016, I spent nine months conducting fieldwork in Chennai, where I interviewed IT
employees, managers, and executives, some of whom were NASSCOM office-bearers. I
also spoke with a number of people indirectly connected to the industry, such as union
leaders, labor activists, diversity and recruitment consultants, and bureaucrats. While
gaining extended access to companies proved to be difficult, I was able to conduct
ethnographic observation in spaces associated with the industry, such as IT
conferences. Moreover, for this paper, a detailed reading of reports issued by the
government and by NASSCOM, and of the NSR website, in particular, informs much of
the analysis. With a view of documents as “‘social facts’ [that are] produced, shared and
used in socially organized ways” (Atkinson and Coffey 2010:79), triangulating interview
and observation data with documentary analysis provided deeper insights into the
implications of the industry’s adoption of a unique identification system for employees.
16 Before proceeding, a brief overview of the NSR is called for. The NSR is now used by
most major IT firms in the country (although it has not been uniformly adopted across

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the industry), with 341 companies having subscribed to it thus far, according to its
official website.12 While not all of my respondents had registered with the NSR (and a
few were not even aware of its existence), all of my younger informants at major IT
firms had been required to do so. Major companies such as Infosys, Wipro and Tata
Consultancy Services have made registration compulsory as a pre-condition of
employment. There are currently over 2.6 million individuals registered in the
database, of whom over 1.7 million have submitted their biometric information.
17 Registration with the NSR consists of two stages: first, employees must fill out the
registration form on the NSR website, where they are required to provide information
including their present and previous addresses, phone number(s), father’s name,
mother’s maiden name, spouse’s name, passport information and PAN card 13 details
(provided the employee is in possession of these documents), along with their
educational and employment histories. Following this, they must visit a “Point of
Service” (POS),14 where they are required to pay the registration fee, 15 provide photo ID
for verification of their profiles, and submit their fingerprints. While the NSR website
does not mention this, two of my respondents also claimed to have had their retinas
scanned for additional biometric information. Once these steps have been completed,
the system generates a unique number for the registered employee, known as an ITPIN.
16

Locating Integrity
18 The extent of direct, visible surveillance within the workspaces of the IT industry is
striking, perhaps reflective of the broader trend towards the rise of routinized
surveillance in modern society (Lyon 2001). When visiting IT offices to conduct
interviews, I was generally required to pass through multiple layers of security before
being allowed in. I was usually asked to enter my name, whom I was there to meet and
which “company” I was from in a log book, and was often asked to surrender my laptop
before entering the premises. At some companies, a sticker was pasted over my phone
camera. One of my respondents, Murali,17 an employee at a mid-sized company
described the level of protection around these companies as being akin to a fort in the
Chola Empire.18 I was told that this level of scrutiny was required to prevent data theft
and keep confidential material secure, as companies often handle sensitive information
for their clients.
19 These surveillance techniques also manifest in more subtle forms, having become
embedded in the work culture of the industry (Upadhya and Vasavi 2006), with a host
of actors having been co-opted into the process of surveilling each other and
themselves.19 Besides managers and IT employees, this includes administrative, security
and cleaning staff. I met one of my informants, Sonam, at an IT park where her
company was located. A busy HR executive, Sonam suggested I interview her in the
building’s food court, to avoid having to surrender my laptop and cell phone. Yet, a few
minutes after opening my laptop, I was told by a member of the cleaning staff that it
was not allowed on the premises and was made to put it away.
20 Similarly, the use of identity cards by employees to “swipe-in and swipe-out” of offices
demonstrates the level of daily scrutiny that they are placed under. Employees wear
their ID cards around their necks, or clipped to their belts, which they scan at
automated turnstiles before entering or leaving their office premises. This process is

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 56

not only meant to prevent “outsiders” from freely entering these complexes, but also
allows companies to maintain a record of the number of hours employees have spent at
work, which can then be linked to employee appraisals. The declaration by two
different executives that their companies “study” employees in a “360-degree” manner
during these appraisals, underscores the importance placed on an overarching,
panoptical view of employees. Some companies have also introduced written
examinations as part of their appraisals, thereby informing employees that their
productivity is being surveilled, scrutinized, and, literally, tested.
21 With the aim of maximizing productivity, these strategies of surveillance have given
rise to a discursive construction referred to as “integrity.” Specifically aimed at
fostering a culture of discipline in the IT workforce, the idea of “integrity” (or a
perceived lack thereof), was explained to me by Pranav, a software developer at a major
company:

They keep sending flyers [email notices] on two things. One is on workplace
harassment, and the other is on integrity. You shouldn’t wear someone else’s
ID card and swipe it at the office, or if you take leave, you should update it.
The company calls these administrative issues “integrity,” and they keep
updating us on that [emphasis added].

In this context, “integrity” refers to employee adherence to corporate policies aimed at

creating a disciplined workforce. While the promotion of integrity is undoubtedly
connected with a broader emphasis on productivity, I would argue that it must
nevertheless be conceptualized as a distinct construct. Within the language of integrity
is encoded the insidious message of employees’ untrustworthiness. As a result,
employees who conform to companies’ disciplining strategies are marked as having
integrity; conversely, acts of resistance can be framed as demonstrating a lack of
integrity. In a climate where IT professionals have slowly begun to take collective
action against employers (Shakthi 2018), the discursive binary of compliant/disruptive
mediated through the deployment of “integrity” imbues companies with further
authority to censure employees. Thus, we observe that subversive behavior aimed at
resisting corporate hegemony can be co-opted by those in power to further their own
agenda (Gupta in Elias 2005:213).
22 The use of “integrity” to either legitimize employees, or to depict them as unreliable,
irresponsible or deceitful, has, in turn, allowed companies to adopt more forceful and
visible disciplining practices. For example, when I spoke to Uttara, a software engineer
at an offshore support center for a major bank, she began to tell me about a “resting
room” at her office, where she went to lie down when she was feeling tired during both
her pregnancies. As she recounted,

Initially when I was pregnant, I didn’t have to tell my managers or anything.

I just had to tell the security staff to open the room [when] I needed to rest,
and I had to enter [my details] in the register. It was initially like that. Later
on, they changed the process. Prior to taking even a nap, I have to send an
email to my manager, who sits in Hyderabad, he has to approve it, and then I
have to show that letter to the security people, then only they will open it.

Uttara was thus required to receive an official authorization to utilize this facility from
her manager, who works in a different city. When I asked her why this change had been
implemented, she mused that people might “misuse” the resting room. Here, we can

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observe the complex interplay between discipline and integrity, with more severe
policies being justified as preemptive measures to counter a perceived lack of integrity.

Verifying Integrity
23 The NSR, as a centralized database that categorizes employees as verified professionals,
might be viewed as a crucial site for crafting “integrity.” According to the NSR website,
the purpose of the database is as follows:

National Skills Registry is a NASSCOM initiative to have a robust and credible

information infrastructure about all persons working in the industry. This
develops trusted and permanent fact sheet of information about each
professional along with background check reports. This is a security best
practice for the industry and assures identity security, [and] industry
acceptance to [sic] honest professionals [words in bold in original]. 20

Like Aadhaar, the NSR emphasizes uniqueness, robustness, credibility, and

permanence: a single, verified profile that will last one’s entire lifetime. Consequently,
one of its key “benefits,” as listed on its website, is that it “creates an environment of
discipline” [emphasis added].21 In the case of the NSR, both companies and employees
have the option of carrying this verification forward further through background
checks on the information listed in employees’ profiles, which are conducted by
“Empaneled Background Checkers” (EBCs). These EBCs are private data verification
companies that have been authorized by NASSCOM to undertake this task. The EBCs
employ a range of verification methods; the employee’s listed current address, for
example, is verified by a member of the EBC physically travelling to the address, while
educational qualifications are cross-checked against listed educational institutions. If a
background check is conducted, the results will be officially recorded in the employee’s
profile.22
24 As with Aadhaar, the purpose of the NSR is not simply to establish the identity of
prospective or current employees, but to authenticate, and therefore legitimize, the
identity they claim to occupy (Nayar 2012:17). The concern over fake credentials is a
prevalent discourse in the industry; in their book, Shah and Nilekani claim that a fifth
of resumes circulating in the IT industry are fake (Nilekani and Shah 2015:249). 23 The
NSR website insists that registration allows employees to “join the league of registered
and trusted professionals,” which will eliminate the risk of “other persons with fake/
inflated details” vying for the same positions.24 This recalls the focus of Aadhaar on
preventing fraud,25 as asserted by the UIDAI, which identifies challenges in the
execution of welfare schemes being largely due to the pervasiveness of “fake and ghost
identities.”26 Through this emphasis on accreditation through biometric identification,
the NSR is used to ensure that the “integrity” of the IT workforce is maintained.
25 Moreover, the IT industry’s anxieties over upholding “integrity” seem to stem, at least
in part, from the industry’s relationship with foreign clients. This is articulated
explicitly in multiple places on the NSR website. Explaining why the project was
launched, the NSR website laments that the absence in India of a “central and public
database of its citizens” is a cause for concern for the industry’s “global clients”
[words in bold in original].27 By compiling this information, the stated purpose of the
NSR is to establish the credibility of the Indian IT workforce, thereby assuring clients
that their sensitive data will be protected.28 Falling within the spectrum of “biopolitical

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strategies that categorize modern bodies” (Harcourt 2009:21), the NSR’s use of
biometric data is its trump card, ensuring employee uniqueness, and consequently,
“integrity,” in the global marketplace. The establishment of the NSR must also be
considered in the context of the industry’s importance in the Indian economy. While no
comprehensive data protection law currently exists in India, 29 a set of rules30 prescribed
by the central government for corporations outlines security and privacy guidelines for
“sensitive” data such as biometric information. Yet, the actual practices that companies
adopt to collect this data have thus far escaped scrutiny, with the NSR being projected,
much like Aadhaar, as merely a “technical solution to the problem of uncertainties of
identity” (Sarkar 2014:525). The ability of NASSCOM, a trade association for private
companies, to collect biometric information from employees and store this in a
centralized database, brings to mind Ong’s theory of “graduated sovereignty”
(Ong 2006). As Ong has noted, “governments adjust political space to the dictates of
global capital, giving corporations an indirect power over the political conditions of
citizens” (Ong 2006:78). Thus, any ethical consideration of the NSR appears to have
been overlooked to accommodate the demands of the transnational capitalist system.

Enforcing Integrity
26 When asking my respondents about the NSR, a number of them, primarily those who
were active in the IT unions that have recently emerged in the city, mentioned an “NSR
blacklist.” Discussions on social media and online forums reveal that this “blacklist,” or
the “blacklisting” of employees on the NSR, is also debated among broader sections of
the IT workforce. Yet, none of my respondents were willing to definitively confirm that
an actual blacklist even existed, or that they could provide proof to this effect. The
process of blacklisting was, instead, visualized as the addition of a “black mark” to an
employee’s NSR profile by their company, or, alternatively, of placing the employee
and their NSR profile on a virtual “blacklist.” In this narrative, employees would not be
aware that they had been placed on a “blacklist.” This was envisioned as a mechanism
through which employers could inform other registered companies that a particular
employee had exhibited transgressive behavior (the nature of which was itself not
clearly defined), effectively rendering them unemployable.
27 Certainly, there are other aspects of the NSR that plainly reveal the power imbalance
between employers and employees in the industry. If a company has lodged a
complaint with the police or has initiated court proceedings against an employee
registered in the NSR, for example, the database permits the company to mention this
on the employee’s profile, even if a verdict has not been arrived at. 31 In contrast, the
disciplinary force of the blacklist emerges from uncertainty; with the truth of its
existence remaining unclear, the nature of indiscretions that could potentially result in
being placed on the blacklist has also been left unspecified. Thus, r ather than the
blacklist itself, the fear of being blacklisted appears to be more compelling within the
wider framework of the NSR and employee integrity. My discussions with IT union
leaders in Chennai revealed their concerns that some employees’ anxiety over being
placed on the blacklist was contributing towards preventing them from participating in
collective action. In my conversation with Hemant and Venkat, both members of a local
IT union, they expanded further on the imagined utility of the NSR for employers in
creating compliance within the workforce:

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Venkat: They [companies] access NASSCOM’s database, so they check if

everything you say is true, using their data. The big fear everyone has is, if
they find out they are in a union, they will blacklist them, so when they
apply to another company, there will be a problem—their whole life will be
ruined […]
Shakthi: But is there proof that they are blacklisting?
V: No, that fear is there. But they are definitely maintaining a database.
Hemant: A lot of HR managers tell their employees, “Your name will be
included in the blacklist.” When they say something like that, we can’t get a
hard copy of proof. But people say this happens in a lot of places...Suddenly,
one fine morning, if they are given a pink slip, and they no longer have that
salary, they can’t even imagine that. They can’t survive for even one week,
and they can’t join another job. So, with that fear alone, these companies
control everything.

We observe through these statements that the actual existence of the blacklist is
irrelevant to its utility as a disciplining mechanism. Through the creation of this
centralized employee repository, the industry is imbued with the ability to control
employees through nothing more than the perceived risk of sanction. As Murali, a
software engineer at a mid-sized company and a member of another IT union
explained, “How they threaten is, we are all one entity. Anywhere you go, we will find
you out. They say that at the beginning itself, we will check all this.” This is not to
suggest that such efforts have gone unchallenged, with the “blacklist” being discussed
as a possible site for collective action by all the IT union leaders I spoke with. In effect,
the ambiguity around the list has overshadowed the NSR itself as a source of
contestation within the “new regimes of surveillance” (Rao 2018:69) facilitated by the
emergence of biometric verification.
28 The possibly mythical existence of the blacklist, viewed through the lens of fraud/
integrity, presents an important site for understanding how Aadhaar might be
deployed to manage residents. While thus far, there does not appear to be a construct
commensurate with the NSR blacklist that has been generated by the introduction of
Aadhaar, it nevertheless holds the potential to give rise to a similar system of
intimidation, partial information and centralized control (Khera 2019). As Aadhaar
continues to seep into deeper corners of everyday life, we might note that, as with the
NSR blacklist, the fear of censure through surveillance alone might emerge as an
increasingly visible tool for curbing dissent against the state.

Conclusion
29 This paper utilizes the framework of the National Skills Registry, a centralized,
permanent database that aims to collect and compile data on Indian IT employees, to
comment on the possibilities for unique identification systems to influence their target
populations. It analyzes the discourse of “integrity” in the Indian IT industry, situating
it within its entrenched culture of surveillance. This discursive construction classifies
employees as either legitimate inhabitants of IT workspaces, or as unsuitable to be
engaged in IT employment. Mediated through the NSR, “integrity” becomes a quality
that can be catalogued and verified. The threat of being placed on the NSR “blacklist,”
an unconfirmed compilation of disobedient employees, exposes the fundamental
challenge to civil liberties contained within systems such as Aadhaar. What forms

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might the discourse of “integrity” assume in the state’s narratives around authenticity
and fraud? As this paper has argued, the very existence of databases that operate
through the centralization of information can result in forms of self-disciplining
through the fear of exclusion.
30 The state’s shift towards operating like a “platform” for the delivery of services
contingent on Aadhaar verification shows strong parallels with IT-based configurations
(Rao and Nair 2019). Indeed, given the critical role of prominent members of the Indian
IT industry in the Aadhaar project, the structures and practices of the industry have
undoubtedly influenced the formulation and implementation of Aadhaar. Moreover,
the existence of the NSR itself is representative of the power of private capital in the
new economy, and of the interconnected nature of state-market relations, with the IT
industry being a particularly influential player in this setting. 32 The government’s
attempts at linking all essential services, whether public or private, to Aadhaar,
underscores the influence of market concerns in its implementation.
31 The possibility of Aadhaar serving as a tool for surveillance, and to discipline and
manage residents, must then be contextualized within the wider system of techno-
social formations in Indian society. Both the NSR and Aadhaar are part of a range of
public and private biometric techniques in India that include fingerprinting technology
to mark attendance in private companies (Rao 2018) and the impending launch of the
world’s largest facial recognition system by the country’s crime data bureau. 33 As
biometric data collection becomes ubiquitous in the lives of Indian residents,
ethnographic studies that pay attention to its everyday practices are crucial for
understanding its socio-political implications. While the potential for “data-creep” is
clearly embedded in Aadhaar, this paper moves beyond the materiality of surveillance
to interrogate specific forms of discursive control. Using the NSR as its site of analysis,
it demonstrates how the language of surveillance both shapes and is constructed by the
structures within which it operates. Thus, by placing Aadhaar within this framework,
we can locate new, situated configurations of the broader culture of techno-
surveillance.

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Thaker, Aria. 2018. “The New Oil: Aadhaar’s Mixing of Public Risk and Private Profit.” The
Caravan, May. Retrieved June 1, 2018 (https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/aadhaar-mixing-
public-risk-private-profit).

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Unique Identification Authority of India. “About your Aadhaar: What is Aadhaar.” Retrieved July
6, 2019 (https://uidai.gov.in/my-aadhaar/about-your-aadhaar.html).

Unique Identification Authority of India. “Frequently Asked Questions: Your Aadhaar–Aadhaar

Features, Eligibility.” Retrieved July 6, 2019 (https://uidai.gov.in/286-faqs/your-aadhaar/
aadhaar-features,-eligibility.html).

Upadhya, Carol and A. R. Vasavi. 2006. Work Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry: A
Sociological Study. Final Report submitted to Indo-Dutch Program for Alternatives in Development.
Bangalore: National Institute for Advanced Studies.

NOTES
1. I am grateful to Professor Pier Giorgio Solinas for organizing the panel at ECSAS in 2018 that
provided the initial impetus to write this article, and the other participants for their feedback
and comments. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. I
must, of course, thank my respondents for their time and generosity.
2. Unique Identification Authority of India. “About your Aadhaar”: https://uidai.gov.in/my-
aadhaar/about-your-aadhaar.html.
3. Surabhi (2017): https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/aadhaar-has-helped-govt-
save-9-b-from-being-lost-to-fraud-wastage-nilekani/article9902030.ece.
4. National Association of Software and Services Companies.
5. Here, I refer primarily to the sectors of the industry devoted to software development, testing,
support and maintenance, as well as to knowledge process outsourcing work, which constituted
the main sites of my study. My study did not include the segments of the industry focused on call
center support and related back office services.
6. The 2018 ruling by the Indian Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Aadhaar Act
decreed that private corporations should not be given access to Aadhaar data. However, new laws
passed in 2019 have allowed companies to use Aadhaar for authentication, provided individuals
give their consent. At the time of writing, the constitutional validity of the new legislation is
being challenged in the Supreme Court. See Rautray (2019): https://
economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/sc-notice-on-plea-challenging-law-on-
private-entities-using-aadhaar/articleshow/72192940.cms.
7. Moreover, one of the registrars authorized to collect residents’ data for Aadhaar is a central
securities depository known as the NSDL, a subsidiary of which manages the NSR database for
NASSCOM.
8. For a detailed analysis of how the mechanics of biometric identification itself can be fallible,
see Magnet (2011).
9. Salzinger (2000) demonstrates in her study of a Mexican maquiladora that sexual desire, and
the consequent sexualization of surveillance, became an actual “force of production” that was
embedded in the factory’s relations of power.
10. Concerns over privacy and surveillance have also attracted a significant amount of interest in
popular writing. See Shukla (2018): https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-
nation/aadhaar-verdict-why-privacy-still-remains-a-central-challenge/articleshow/
65970934.cms; Datta (2017): https://scroll.in/article/832592/the-end-of-privacy-aadhaar-is-
being-converted-into-the-worlds-biggest-surveillance-engine; Dixit (2017): https://
www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/one-id-to-rule-them-all-controversy-plagues-
indias-aadhaar; Sethi (2017): https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/despite-govt-
denials-states-building-databases-for-360-degree-profiles-of-citizens/story-
qnSLHGyZIXiZiO4ce84UuO.html.

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11. See Corbridge and Harriss (2008) for an analysis of the impact of the 1991 economic reforms
on the Indian economy.
12. National Skills Registry. “Homepage”: https://nationalskillsregistry.com.
13. In India, a PAN, or Permanent Account Number, is a unique identifier issued by the Indian
government’s Income Tax Department to tax-paying individuals or entities for financial
transactions. Those in possession of a PAN number are given a PAN card, which is considered a
valid identity document.
14. There are several of these verification centers in every city with a major IT presence; some
companies also have their own POS booths within their premises.
15. The registration fee is currently Rs.400. It is expected that employees will then pay a further
Rs.100 every year to renew their membership, although this is not enforced.
16. Registered employees can only view their own profiles and do not have access to other
registrants’ information. An employer can view the profiles of registered employees at their own
company, as well as the profiles of other IT professionals who have granted them access (which
might happen, for example, if they are hoping to procure a job at the authorized company).
17. All respondents have been given pseudonyms.
18. The Chola dynasty was at its peak between the tenth and twelfth centuries CE, when it ruled
large parts of South India, as well as regions in neighboring countries, such as Sri Lanka, and was
known for its military might.
19. Executives themselves can, at times, feel surveilled. Sriram, an executive at a major ITES
company, while speaking to me about his company’s diversity initiatives, reflected on how his
own diversity-related actions were constantly being watched and judged by his employees: “I am
sitting in [my office] like I am a zoo exhibit, except for that kind of opaque stuff [indicates the
frosted glass wall]. I’m exhibit number one.”
20. National Skills Registry. “Companies / NSR Benefits”: https://nationalskillsregistry.com/
companies-nsr-benefits.htm.
21. National Skills Registry. “Companies / NSR Benefits”: https://nationalskillsregistry.com/
companies-nsr-benefits.htm.
22. National Skills Registry. “Knowledge Professional / Background Verification”: https://
nationalskillsregistry.com/background-verification.htm.
23. The NSR website refers to this as the “menace of bloated resume’ [sic] and ‘CV faking’.” See
National Skills Registry. “Companies / FAQs”: https://nationalskillsregistry.com/faq-for-
companies.htm.
24. National Skills Registry. “Knowledge Professional / Participate in NSR”: https://
nationalskillsregistry.com/companies-participating-in-nsr.htm.
25. As Cohen (2019; 2017) has argued, “de-duplication,” rather than service delivery itself, is the
central aim of Aadhaar.
26. Unique Identification Authority of India. “Frequently Asked Questions”: https://uidai.gov.in/
286-faqs/your-aadhaar/aadhaar-features,-eligibility.html.
27. National Skills Registry. “National Skills Registry / NSR Context”: https://
nationalskillsregistry.com/nsr-context.htm.
28. It is interesting to note that while concerns over the leakage or misuse of Aadhaar data have
attracted both media and scholarly attention, the stated purpose of the NSR is to prevent
precisely this sort of data breach for clients.
29. At the time of writing, the Personal Data Protection Bill, a proposed piece of legislation that
would provide a legal framework for data privacy and security in India, was being discussed in
Parliament.
30. These are the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and
Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011, notified under the Information Technology
Act, 2000.

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31. National Skills Registry. “National Skills Registry (NSR) Tour for Subscriber Companies”:
https://nationalskillsregistry.com/doc/nsrtour-subscribercompanies.pdf.
32. The NSR website states that the industry has agreed to extend the NSR to the country’s
banking and finance sectors. See National Skills Registry. “About Us”: https://
nationalskillsregistry.com/aboutus.htm.
33. The National Crime Records Bureau has recently issued a tender to launch the National
Automated Facial Recognition System. The aim of this project is to combat crime and collect
evidence by collating facial images from a range of sources, including government agencies,
CCTV footage and newspapers.

ABSTRACTS
Supporters of Aadhaar, the unique identification scheme that aims to use biometric information
and a 12-digit number to catalogue every Indian resident, have often commented on the
tremendous amount of “fraud” that this program has curtailed since its introduction nearly a
decade ago. Four years before the first Aadhaar number was issued, this discourse of ensuring
authenticity was similarly deployed by the Indian information technology (IT) industry’s
employer association, NASSCOM, which inaugurated its own unique identification project to
verify potential and current employees. Known as the National Skills Registry (NSR), this
database utilizes biometric identification to create individual profiles of IT employees, each of
whom is assigned a unique number called an ITPIN.
In this paper, I draw on interview and observation data collected during nine months of
fieldwork in Chennai’s IT industry, as well as a detailed analysis of industry reports and
documents, to dissect employee and corporate narratives on the NSR. I interrogate the
overarching discourse of employee “integrity” operating within the industry to deconstruct the
myth-making, misconceptions and self-disciplining generated by the existence of this database.
As a result, I provide a comparative framework through which to conceptualize Aadhaar’s
implications for safeguarding individual privacy, while also commenting on the power of private
players under neoliberal capitalism and the increasing ubiquity of surveillance strategies in the
lives of Indian residents.

INDEX
Keywords: Aadhaar, India, biometrics, surveillance, IT industry, integrity

AUTHOR
S. SHAKTHI
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras

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Biometric Infrastructures and the

Indian Public Distribution System
Silvia Masiero

Introduction
1 The Public Distribution System (PDS) is the main food security program in India, based
on the distribution of primary necessity goods at subsidized prices. 1 Prompted by the
severe food shortages experienced in pre-independence India, the PDS is a nationwide
scheme articulated in two parts: firstly, essential commodities (primarily rice, wheat,
sugar, and kerosene)2 are procured by the central government from private producers
at below market prices, and secondly, these are redistributed through fair-price shops,
most commonly known as ration shops, throughout the nation. Organization of the PDS
is divided between the central government, which makes decisions on national food
policy and allocates rationed goods to the states, and state administrations, which
design and implement distribution schemes at the local level.
2 The nation’s dependency on food imports was high in pre-independence times, but
significantly reduced following the Green Revolution in the early and mid-1960s.
Launched in 1965, the PDS was thus designed as a scheme for internal redistribution of
foodgrains, purchased from food-surplus regions and transferred to food-deficit ones at
affordable prices. However, one stream of scholarship views the 1990s as a “lost
decade” in the improvement of national living standards, since economic growth was
not matched by proportional outcomes in poverty reduction (Sen and Himanshu 2004;
Himanshu 2007)3 and, as exposed by the latest round of the National Family Health
Survey (NFHS-4) conducted in 2015-16, India still struggles with achieving basic goals of
health and nutrition.
3 Over the last two decades, state-level PDS schemes have become increasingly
computerized, especially in response to the issues of diversion to the private market
that affect the program. The argument supporting end-to-end digitization of anti-
poverty schemes in the name of greater effectiveness has been applied to the PDS,
generating local systems that inscribe technology in diverse parts of the program’s

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supply chain. A catalyst for such efforts has emerged in the form of Aadhaar, the
nationwide database which assigns a unique biometric and 12-digit identifier to all
enrollees. With the passing of the Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies
Benefits and Services Act—most commonly known as the Aadhaar Bill—in March 2016,
the integration of biometric identification into anti-poverty programs was legally
ratified and, as of the time of writing, has been introduced in multiple Indian states.
4 Based on nine-year research on the computerization of the PDS, this paper reflects on
the ongoing transformation experienced by the program and its effects through the
adoption of the ecosystem constituted by Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and mobile
technologies—the “JAM Trinity”—that proposes to improve access to social benefits for
all. Governmental narratives illustrate the proposed transformation, the
implementation of a new cash transfer system to eliminate distortions to the economy
and prevent diversion. It is argued that, while justified by solid anti-poverty objectives,
the biometric transformation of the PDS does not impede exclusion errors, and the
transition to the cash transfer system has uncertain effects on recipients’ ability to
access social protection. Contributing to the debates on coded citizenship and social
policy in India, the paper reflects on the transformation that biometric infrastructures
induce in the PDS, and considers various measures for achieving greater inclusivity in
line with the National Food Security Act (NFSA) legislation.
5 This paper is structured as follows. Following a synopsis of my fieldwork and
methodology, I detail the key phases in the history of the PDS, from pre-independence
times until the move from a universal to a targeted system in 1997. I then introduce the
issue of diversion, and the ways in which successive digital systems have sought to
address its shortcomings. The effects of digital transformation are then discussed
through insights from my research on Kerala and Karnataka, two states that moved to
an Aadhaar-based PDS after a history of back-end digitization. The discussion positions
the paper in the debates on coded citizenship and Indian social policy, and reviews
some alternatives for tailoring new technologies to ensure a more effective PDS.

Fieldwork and methodology

6 My interest in the computerization of social protection schemes, of which the Indian
PDS is an example, began in 2010 with a preliminary study of the PDS in Kerala. Back
then the program was being augmented by a four-module software which facilitated
ration card release, allocation of foodgrains, monitoring of ration shops, and provided a
web portal through which relations with recipients were to be managed. The
introduction of the proposed digital transformation of a large anti-poverty
infrastructure raised conceptual and practical issues that triggered my research
interest, leading me to investigate the state-level digital PDS in Kerala and its
implementation. My PhD fieldwork, conducted in 2011-2012, consisted of 126
interviews with the actors of the Kerala PDS, observation in PDS outlets, and live
demonstrations of the system already in operation at the National Informatics Centre
(NIC) in charge of the computerization (Masiero 2015, 2017).
7 Initially developed separately from anti-poverty schemes (Nilekani and Shah 2016),
over time the biometric infrastructure of Aadhaar became incorporated in the PDS of
several states, giving rise to the current, biometrically-enabled authentication system.
This had implications for the domains of program architecture and recipients’

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entitlements, which my research intended to reveal. For this reason, working in the
state of Karnataka which pioneered a state-level biometric system and then adopted an
Aadhaar-based PDS, I conducted two more rounds of fieldwork, respectively in
2014-2015 (on the state-level biometric system) and 2018-2019 (on the Aadhaar-enabled
one). This research, published in several works (Masiero and Prakash 2015; Prakash and
Masiero 2015; Masiero 2018; Masiero and Das 2019), is complemented by a systematic
review of cases of Aadhaar-based PDS in India based on secondary sources and aimed at
understanding the diversity of state-level experiences in which my primary findings
are contextualized.
8 I adopt a qualitative-interpretive method of enquiry in my research. Interpretive
research is premised on the position that our knowledge of reality, rather than an
appraisal of a unique and objective truth, is a social construction by human actors
(Walsham 2006). This leads the researcher to appraise actors’ multiple interpretations
of the phenomena of interest, spending time in the field and tracing the history of the
subjective images that actors form of the events and processes they encounter. This
method, termed a “historiography of images” in my PhD research (Masiero 2014),
inspires my data collection and analysis, which is centered on respondent-led accounts
of the phenomena under discussion and triangulated with perspectives from other
respondents, observation in the field and secondary data according to the core
principles of interpretive research (Walsham 2006).

PDS: From Pre-Independence Rationing to Universal

Distribution
9 Mooij (1998) articulates the historical development of the PDS in three phases. In the
first phase (1939-1965) the original traits of the food distribution program emerged,
while in the second (1965-1990) the scheme operated under a universal form
coordinated by the Food Corporation of India (FCI). In the third phase, beginning with
the Structural Adjustment Programme of 1991, the PDS became a targeted scheme,
reducing subsidies to households above the poverty line (APL) and, in certain states,
eliminating APL subsidies altogether.
10 India depended highly on foreign imports of foodgrain until 1939, when rationing was
introduced as an emergency measure in Bombay (Mooij 1998:79). It was from within a
scenario of lowered production of foodgrains per capita and high import reliance, in
tandem with a cessation of Burmese shipments of rice and wheat after its fall in April
1942, that war erupted (Mooij 1998:80). Entitlement failures, combined with food
deficits at the local level, caused between 1.5 and 3 million deaths in the Bengal famine
of 1943 (Sen 1981). In his essay on the root causes of famines, Sen illustrates how the
colonial machinery and the pursuit of war diverted food away from the needy by
prioritizing procurement for the ongoing conflict, precipitating a crisis of entitlements
rather than an effective shortage of food (Sen 1981:52–85).4
11 As Mooij (1998:80) notes, wartime food-related concerns focused especially on
foodgrain prices, revealing the need for an effective mechanism for the centralization
of purchase and distribution of foodgrains. At the sixth Price Control Conference (1942)
a Food Department was created, defining the core functions of an early-stage
distribution system which aimed to regulate prices and curb distributional issues in
times of war. The Food Department was mandated to buy foodgrains from private

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producers in provinces in which there was a surplus and allocate them to provinces in
which there was a deficit, where they would be sold below market price
(Mooij 1998:80). Post-Independence, the Department was maintained under Nehru
although these years were again characterized by high reliance on food imports from
neighboring countries (Mooij 1998:81–84).
12 In 1965 the food security system took the shape of the PDS under the management of
the newly established FCI. As stated by the Foodgrain Prices Committee, the mandate of
the FCI was that of “enabling the government to undertake trading operations, through
which it will influence market prices” (Government of India 1968, cited in
Mooij 1998:84). The establishment of FCI gave rise to the universal PDS, a shape that the
program maintained until the early 1990s. The scheme’s operations took over the tasks
performed in the 1940s by the Food Department: the FCI bought commodities from
private producers, stored them in warehouses across the nation, and redistributed
them through Authorized Wholesale Dealers (AWDs) from which ration shops collected
goods monthly.
13 From 1965 to 1990 the amount of foodgrains traded by the FCI increased from 10 to
more than 18 million tons, and the number of ration shops in the nation grew to over
350 thousand (Mooij 1998:86). The size of subsidy increased from 0.04 percent of GDP in
1970-1971 to 0.5 percent in 1990-1991 (Ahluwalia 1993). In these first decades of
existence, an important strength of the scheme was its network of ration shops which
offered a proximity to users, even in remote villages, and was aimed at making the
State a visible presence in poorer people’s lives.
14 At the same time, in these early phases implementation varied among different states.
While subjected to central government’s general policy guidelines, states have
considerable power over PDS implementation, including the ability to set food subsidy
rates and distribution parameters in terms of benefits and beneficiaries. As a result,
despite the universality of PDS at the central level, some states elaborated pro-poor
schemes designed specifically for vulnerable groups. For example, in the Green Card
Scheme implemented in the 1980s in Karnataka, 40 percent of the population was
entitled to a “Green Card” which gave them the right to higher subsidies from the PDS
(Mooij 1998:87–8). In spite of this state-level targeting, at the national level, the system
remained universal and grounded on homogeneous prices.

PDS: Targeting and Its Consequences

15 In the 1990s the PDS was subjected to profound changes. The universality of the system
had exposed it to two major critiques: an urban bias was found in public distribution,
which largely excluded rural communities from the system (Howes and Jha 1992;
Dantwala 2006).5 Systemic leakage to non-poor recipients also caused concerns of
public expenditure, as providing a subsidy to all citizens incurred expenses that India,
facing a severe fiscal crisis, could not possibly sustain (Radhakrishna 1996; Dutta and
Ramaswami 2001; Umali-Deininger and Deininger 2001; Ramaswami and
Balakrishnan 2002).
16 Reforms to the scheme, culminating in the adoption of a new targeted system in 1997,
were an integral part of the neoliberal reforms that India embarked upon in the early
1990s. At that time state interventionism, which predominated as a government
philosophy in the first decades after Independence (Corbridge and Harriss 2000), was

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contested due to the systemic economic and distributional inefficiencies attributed to it

(Radhakrishna and Subbarao 1997; Umali-Deininger and Deininger 2001). What was put
forward in its place was a form of neoliberal thought that framed the solution as two
concomitant actions: consistent reductions in public expenditure on social protection
on the one hand, and the introduction of open competition in the country’s economy
on the other (Corbridge and Harriss 2000). These interventions ascribed to the
philosophy of New Public Management, a style of government that fosters effectiveness
by minimizing the role of the state and adopting incentives proper of the private
sector.
17 As an integral part of its project of economic liberalization, in 1991 India embarked
upon a Structural Adjustment Programme, aimed at ending the ongoing fiscal crisis and
relaunching the economy through neoliberal reforms. At the core of the project was
the view of markets as the means to solve the inefficiencies that the nation
experienced: the project saw the role of the state as a protector of property rights and
ultimately, a mere guarantor of the proper functioning of markets (Corbridge and
Harriss 2000). The state was therefore induced to refrain from market interventions, to
limit the risk of systemic inefficiencies (Harvey 2005). The overarching idea of a
neoliberal solution, which saw market openness as a key driver and state intervention
as a hurdle, characterized the India of the early 1990s, resulting in the restructuring of
systems of social assistance in ways that sought to maximize economic manageability.
18 The need for reduction in the national public expenditure, a direct prescription of the
Structural Adjustment Programme, had visible consequences on the management of
the PDS. Severe inefficiencies were substantiated in the point, made by World Bank
economists, that the system enabled “meagre transfer at exorbitant cost”
(Radhakrishna and Subbarao 1997:7) due to its universal nature, while fiscal
expenditures were reported to yield long-term distortions on private markets
ultimately hurting the poor (Ramaswami and Balakrishnan 2002). Such concerns
became the root of the new targeted PDS, which converted universal provision into
reservation of subsidy to below-poverty-line (BPL) households.
19 This new PDS, introduced in the nation in June 1997, represented a changed rationale
behind which were two fundamental structural changes:
20 - First, the program shifted away from universal provision to channels of subsidy
distribution restricted to the BPL category while providing states some leeway to
maintain a minimum subsidy for the APL. A higher subsidy was introduced for the
poorest of the poor, classified under the Antiyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) scheme.
Qualification for both BPL and AAY categories was now determined in accordance with
periodically reviewed income-based poverty lines.
21 - Second, the universal PDS had allocated goods to states based on theoretical
requirement. In the targeted system, commodities began to be allocated on the basis of
relative state poverty: the central government prepares individual estimates of poverty
incidence on each state, and on the basis of these estimates supplies of goods are
allocated proportionally (Tritah 2003).
22 To combat a structural drawback of the universal system, subsidies on essential goods
were reserved for the needy, in order to eliminate dispersal to the economically secure.
As a result of the targeted PDS, the central government’s fiscal subsidy expenditure was
effectively reduced (Umali-Deininger and Deininger 2001:328). Another effect of this

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move was that APL citizens, left with little or no subsidy on PDS commodities, largely
opted out of the PDS and returned to purchasing essential goods on the free market.
23 In the debate on social protection systems, one school of thought supports targeting as
it not only provides the means of reducing fiscal expenditure, but also an ability to cope
with the needs of a large poor and undernourished population. Another stream argues
the targeted PDS does not successfully avoid exclusion errors leading to serious
disruptions in food security (e.g. Swaminathan 2008; Khera 2011a; Sen and
Himanshu 2011; Drèze and Khera 2015).
24 Among the nation’s 29 states, the experience of Kerala is a clear example of the
transition issues involved in the switch to a targeted PDS. Before 1997, Kerala was
recognized as operating the best state-level PDS in India (Swaminathan 2002). Under
the initial universal system PDS distribution catered to 97 percent of the state’s
population (George 1979:23) and the impact on beneficiaries’ nutritional status was
high and significant (Kumar 1979). However after the implementation of targeting in
1997, the state-level system endured three orders of entitlement access problems:
25 - As a result of centralized poverty assessments, allocation of foodgrains to the state
was reduced to an amount lower than 10 percent of the pre-targeting supply
(Swaminathan 2002:51). Poverty incidence in the state was estimated at just 25 percent,
significantly reducing allocation of goods to beneficiaries. The state government re-
estimated poverty from 25 percent to 42 percent of the population, but a drop in
available supplies still hindered entitlements.
26 - After 1997, households recognized as APL opted out the system in vast numbers, as a
result of the sharp reduction in subsidy reserved for them. This is reflected in data on
the overall offtake of cereals: as per Khera’s (2011b:107) estimates, statewide purchases
from the PDS dropped from 4.64 tons in 1997 to 1.71 tons in 2001. Kerala is one of the
states where a subsidy to the APL, while minimal, still exists at the present time, but
given its comparatively limited quantities many former beneficiaries were de facto
excluded from it.
27 - Following the sudden shrink of the customer base, many ration shops became
unviable and closed down (Krishnakumar 2000). The drastic reduction in foodgrain
supplies, and the factual exclusion of the APL from purchases, created a situation in
which ration shops were made unviable, with consequences in terms of debt that
resulted in a wave of suicides among ration dealers (Suchitra 2004) and many ration
shops closing down.
28 As a consequence, direct or indirect, of those conditions listed above, PDS actors largely
engaged in illegal sales on the private market, where standard prices are higher
generating substantial profits for those who go undetected. Leakage of PDS goods on
the private market, a phenomenon termed “rice mafia” by the Justice Wadhwa
Committee on PDS (2010), undermines the viability of the PDS and, as the body of
scholars mentioned above points out, ultimately prevents exactly the food security that
the system is aimed at guaranteeing for all residents.
29 Systematic leakage constitutes a serious issue in the program and the principal
disruption to its normal functioning (Saini, et al 2017). While different states have
taken different measures for accountability enforcement over time, targeting has
reduced the customer base of ration shops, which are left in dire need of new resources
for business continuation. Khera’s (2011a:1058) note that “corruption has become a

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requirement of economic survival for the PDS dealers” constitutes a first-order

problem in the PDS, undermining its ability to effectively serve its beneficiaries.

PDS Computerization: From State-Level Systems to

Aadhaar
30 The PDS is an integral part of national social policy, but operates at the state level. The
central government, which is in charge of policy formulation, makes decisions on
procurement and allocation based on state population and relative shares of BPL
households (Tritah 2003:5). State governments implement and manage the PDS, making
decisions on crucial factors such as offtake, the location of ration shops, and the list of
goods provided through the program (Tritah 2003:6). While the issue price is
determined centrally, state governments are allowed to modify it as a result of the
additional costs of stock and delivery (Tritah 2003:6), and are in charge of operational
decisions on program management to facilitate delivery and combat diversion at the
sub-national level (Khera 2011b).
31 Several states have been early adopters of PDS computerization, initially implemented
as a measure configured to fix the multiple crises induced by targeting. In Kerala the
PDS was digitized across three different phases: the first consisted in the creation of a
digital database, stored at the level of taluks (sub-district administrative units), in
which details of all users of the PDS were registered. The second coincided with the
implementation of a software package automatizing the key functions of PDS in Taluk
Supply Offices (TSOs), the offices in charge of the local administration of the program.
The third phase, started with a pilot scheme in 2012, consists of integrating the
distribution system with Aadhaar—India’s biometric population database. This scheme
allowed PDS users to obtain their entitlements from ration shops using a secure
identification system.
32 The experience of Kerala is paradigmatic of that of other states such as Chhattisgarh,
Gujarat and Karnataka which embarked on early forms of computerization of their
PDS'. In Chhattisgarh, priority was given to computerization of the back-end phases of
the PDS and a tracking system was built to control diversion in the early stages of the
supply chain (Rajan, Chopra, Somashekar and Laux 2016). In Gujarat and Karnataka,
biometric identification was implemented in ration shops even prior to Aadhaar
seeding, to guarantee the authenticity of users’ entitlement and combat ration dealers’
malpractice. The Aadhaar system, launched in 2009, provided a common national
matrix to underpin efforts of biometric identification.
33 In January 2009 the Government of India set up the Unique Identification Authority of
India (UIDAI) to collect the biometric data of all residents, store them in a central
database, and give each enrollee a unique 12-digit number. In June 2009, Nandan
Nilekani (the co-founder of Infosys, a large technology services enterprise) was
appointed as the first head of UIDAI, which was established as an office of the Planning
Commission of the Central Government. Starting from 2010, Aadhaar enrolment
centers were set up across the nation and state governments led proactive campaigns
to increase their residents’ adherence to the scheme. The National Democratic Alliance
(NDA) government has supported continuation of the scheme, which originated under
the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, and especially fostered its
inscription in the social protection system designed to serve the poor (Bhatia and

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Bhabha 2017). This makes Aadhaar an integral part of India’s social policy, and the
government’s strategy openly incorporates it in the fight to work against the leakage
that affects the PDS (Government of India 2015). In August 2019 89.2 percent of the
population had an Aadhaar number assigned, and high enrolment rates were achieved
even in India’s poorest states.6 With more than 1.2 billion numbers issued to residents,
Aadhaar is now the biggest biometric database in the world, explicitly linked to the
provision of public services and social welfare.7
34 Effective incorporation of Aadhaar in the PDS started in 2011-2012, with pilot projects
undertaken at the local level in different states (Saini et al. 2017). These projects
introduced Aadhaar recognition in the ration shop space that constitutes the last mile
of the supply chain. In the East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, one of the first in
the country to pilot the scheme, PDS beneficiaries were requested to register with
Aadhaar and their identification number was linked with the ration card database
which reported on their poverty status. Ration shops were endowed with biometric
point-of-sale machines set to recognize beneficiaries through their fingerprint, hence
delivering the exact monthly allotment to which each user was entitled.
35 State-level instances of Aadhaar-based PDS were justified with the establishment of a
two-fold accountability mechanism aimed at guaranteeing the entitlement of
beneficiaries and simultaneously, preventing ration dealers from engaging in illegal
sales. These schemes were initially confined to the stage of pilot projects, as a Supreme
Court order in September 2013 prohibited making Aadhaar a mandatory requirement
for access to anti-poverty programs. Public debate centered on the extent to which
enrolment was effectively non-coercive, given the increasing entrenchment of Aadhaar
authentication in the large majority of public services. In August 2015, a new Supreme
Court order made it possible for states to use Aadhaar in their PDS schemes.
36 In March 2016, the Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and
Services Act was passed in Parliament, providing legal backing to the incorporation of
Aadhaar in state-level PDS implementations. Criticism emerged around the governing
coalition’s choice to pass the act as a Money Bill, a legislative act which is directly
enforced once passed in the Lower House without sanctioning by the Upper House of
Parliament. Finding its origins in the National Identification Authority of India Bill
passed in 2010, the Aadhaar Bill enabled states to include Aadhaar identification in
their social protection schemes, and thus state-level PDS implementations to become
officially Aadhaar-based. As it afforded a formal shift to biometrics in anti-poverty core
programs, the Bill is viewed as the final act of incorporating Aadhaar in the social
protection system.
37 Interwoven with the debate on social protection, there are growing concerns about
Aadhaar’s affordances in developing a surveillance state, in which private parties
would access UIDAI data without reliable controls (Rao and Nair 2019:477). Addressing
such preoccupations, the Supreme Court emitted a final verdict in September 2018,
declaring Aadhaar’s constitutionality in the light of its role in strengthening social
welfare. The verdict directly connects Aadhaar to its affordances in public welfare
delivery, and for the same reason it limits its use by private parties with commercial
purposes (Rao and Nair 2019:477). In continuity with the Aadhaar bill, the verdict
frames digital identification into the functional role of enabler of public services, hence
backing the continued entrenchment on Aadhaar in national social protection schemes.

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The Aadhaar-Based PDS: Effects on Entitlements

38 Based on the experiences of Kerala and Karnataka, two states that adopted an Aadhaar-
based PDS after an earlier history of digitization, the transition to biometric
recognition has yielded a set of seemingly positive short-term effects, three of which
have emerged from my research: reduced ration dealer incentive to corruption,
strengthened leakage controls, and the affordance (still not actualized) of enabling
recipients to opt out of the ration shop they are registered with, upon suspicion of
diversion by the ration dealer. The three types of effects are illustrated below.
39 First, an Aadhaar-based PDS reduces the incentive for ration dealers to sell goods on
the market instead of targeting genuinely entitled recipients. The mechanism
underlying this is grounded on how, enabling secure identification of beneficiaries, a
biometric system tackles the problem of fake transaction records, which—as data from
both states reveal—were used by ration dealers to hide the conduct of illegal
transactions on private markets (Masiero 2015; Prakash and Masiero 2015). Fake
transactions, normally justified through bogus ration card numbers, allowed ration
dealers to claim having sold to entitled recipients at PDS prices, while selling on private
markets and generating illicit profits. The Aadhaar infrastructure verifies identification
through biometrics: the invention of non-existing customers thus becomes difficult to
enact, diminishing the opportunity for corruption of the system by ration dealers.
40 Second, controls on leakage are strengthened as the Aadhaar-verified identity of
customers is used to monitor the offtake of goods from ration shops. Beyond checking
the identity of buyers, point-of-sale machines register the amount of commodities sold
at every transaction: all sales of PDS goods are thus recorded in a dedicated database,
further reducing ration dealers’ ability to invent sales that have not occurred in
practice. In addition, the system allows verification that sold quantities match those
received by ration shops after monthly allocation, making it difficult for ration dealers
to claim “running out” of goods and then divert them to the market. This mechanism
complements the control on bogus ration cards, especially given that ration dealers
cannot register for fresh ration stocks until the quantity for a given month has been
completely disbursed.
41 A third mechanism, acting on the demand side, proposes to delink ration shops from
the households registered with each of them. Every household was originally linked to
one ration shop, and hence able to buy PDS goods only from it. As a result, even if
customers become aware of ration dealer misbehavior (most frequently enacted by
underselling or claiming “running out” of goods), they have no option to purchase
from a different dealer. Aadhaar-based point-of-sale machines, however, afford the
possibility to recognize all residents registered with the system, hence enabling a
“portable” PDS in which purchases could be made from any ration shop. While this “
delinking” has not yet occurred, the technology is designed and implemented in such a
way to enable it, and a system operating in this way would enable recipients to opt out
of ration shops indulging in illicit behavior.
42 Proponents of the system argue that the combination of reduction in corruption
incentives, controls on diversion, and delinking users from ration shops makes an
Aadhaar-based PDS more effective and accountable, reducing the inclusion errors that
affect the system as a whole (Gulati and Saini 2015; Saini et al. 2017). Inclusion errors
occur when a targeted system erroneously includes non-entitled beneficiaries, such as

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agents in the private markets or owners of bogus ration cards. Technology-based

interventions on state-level PDS have already shown their effectiveness especially in
Chhattisgarh, where an automatized system (COREPDS) has been instrumental to
program improvement, offering an alternative to Aadhaar that creates new forms of
back-end monitoring and reduces estimated diversion (Rajan et al. 2016; Khera 2018). In
Kerala, where post-targeting problems had been significant, computerization has
improved the ability to allocate goods at the ration shop level and monitor offtake from
the program (Masiero 2015).
43 As I have argued elsewhere (Masiero 2017) however, experiences of Aadhaar-based PDS
are just a component of the grand design of change behind the scheme. Understanding
such design requires attention to a composite infrastructure, first announced in the
Economic Survey 2014-2015, in which Aadhaar is combined with two more
technologies: a financial inclusion program (the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana,
commonly referred to simply as Jan Dhan Yojana), and mobile phones, whose
ownership by vulnerable segments of the population has increased over the last
decades. A flagship scheme of the NDA government, Jan Dhan Yojana aims at providing
lower-income households with a bank account, which will constitute the backbone core
infrastructure for the direct transfer of benefits to those entitled. The program was
launched in 2015 and led to the opening of millions of zero-balance bank accounts for
BPL households, in an effort towards financial inclusion of marginalized communities
(Kaur and Singh 2015).
44 The combination of Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and mobile payments, acronymized as
“JAM trinity” in the current governments’ narrative, is planned with the explicit
purpose of rebuilding the nation’s anti-poverty system by converting existing subsidies
into a lump-sum transfer to the BPL (Government of India 2015:64). The concept of
financialization, used in development studies to refer to the increased use of financial
instruments in development policy (Young 2010), powerfully captures the rationale
behind the JAM ecosystem. Behind it is the idea that in-kind subsidies, while widely
deployed as a means to anti-poverty policy, do not constitute an ideal solution for the
delivery of social protection schemes, as they suffer from multiple issues (they are
identified in the Economic Survey 2014-2015 as being regressive, distorting the market
in ways that harm the poor, and being prone to leakage and diversion). As a result,
development policies based on novel financial instruments are encouraged whether
developed from scratch or on top of previously constructed development schemes
infrastructures.
45 Importantly in this context, the implementation of the JAM trinity has precise
implications for the future of the PDS and India’s social protection at large. At present,
various states are engaging in the move to Aadhaar-based systems, where biometric
infrastructures are built into the program as it was. As specified in the Economic
Survey 2014-2015, the JAM trinity serves instead to prepare a move to a new scheme of
direct transfers, transforming food rations into transfers of cash direct to beneficiaries’
bank accounts (Government of India 2015:64–65). As reported by the Survey, the new
scheme serves to eliminate PDS leakages and the distortions induced by subsidies.
46 The shift from PDS to cash transfers has already been piloted in Pondicherry,
Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli,8 and is at the center of debate in Indian social
policy (e.g. Svedberg 2012; Khera 2014; Chanchani 2017). Advocates of the policy shift
point to the structural ineffectiveness of the PDS, arguing that leakages and distortions

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brought in by state subsidies need elimination at the roots, but a growing set of
narratives has emerged in opposition to this, raising concerns with Aadhaar-based PDS
and the JAM trinity alike. In my research on the PDS through the years, three core
problems have emerged: these revolve around technical fragilities, the persistence of
exclusion errors, and the shift in food governance structures determined by the
passage from the PDS to a market-led system.
47 Technical fragilities emerge from project complexities, specifically implementation of
diverse infrastructures to automatize monitoring of sales and offtake. The problem of
technical fragility emerged with particular visibility early in the Aadhaar-based PDS
adoption process and affected multiple states in the nation, for instance in Rajasthan
there were violent demonstrations and cases of vandalism of ration shop POS
machines, motivated by people’s frustration with the malfunctions of the new system. 9
The problem induced by technical fragilities is powerfully summarized by the
economist Jean Drèze:

This system requires multiple fragile technologies to work at the same time:
the PoS machine, the biometrics, the internet connection, remote servers
and often other elements such as the local mobile network. Further, it
requires at least some household members to have an Aadhaar number,
correctly seeded in the PDS database (cited in Shagun and Aditi 2016).

Infrastructural complexity leads to system malfunctions registered in diverse states

and regions and casting doubt on claims of Aadhaar-based PDS effectiveness (Drèze and
Khera 2017). Malfunctions run the risk of exacerbating exclusion errors. This is
identified as the main problem brought by the PDS transformation to a targeted system
(Swaminathan 2008; Khera 2011a). The term “exclusion errors” refers to problems that
lead genuinely needful households to be excluded from targeted programs due to
erroneous categorization of their status or ineffective delivery mechanisms
(Tritah 2003). If users are not recognized from the front-end interface of the biometric
PDS, the risk is that of exclusion from access to food rations, an outcome that has
already been noted in biometrically enabled systems across the nation (Masiero and
Prakash 2015; Drèze and Khera 2017).
48 Some commentators classify such problems as transitory rather than structural, since
they pertain to technological implementation and not to the structural properties (i.e.
the intrinsic technological features) of the new system. If technological improvements
were sufficient, few issues would remain in the program, such as the limited profit
margins of ration dealers—resulting in continuation of incentives to corruption.
Supporters argue issues of this type are a legacy of the shift to a targeted system, and
may persist in spite of the checks introduced by the new technology. Proponents of the
new direct transfer benefit policy argue that a shift to a cash transfer system would
eliminate the roots of the problem, since ration shops could be eliminated (Saini et
al. 2017).
49 What remains problematic, however, is the change in food governance that this entails,
which has been problematized by bureaucrats and PDS users alike. As in the early days
of its implementation, the PDS is managed by state governments and run by
bureaucracies that, despite the multiple issues illustrated above, are familiar to
recipients of the program. A move to cash transfers would radically change existing
governance structures, shifting control from state bureaucracies to markets in which
recipients would purchase their goods. While the move is justified by the purpose of

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elimination of leakages and distortion, commentators observe that the transition

entails exasperation of the risk of exclusion errors, which might endanger the greater
effectiveness brought about by reforms (Drèze and Khera 2017; Chanchani 2017).
50 These observations are reflected in my latest study of the Aadhaar-based PDS in
Karnataka (Masiero and Das 2019). To our question of whether they would welcome a
transition from the current in-kind subsidies to cash transfers, recipients provided
quasi-unanimous negative responses, motivated by three main reasons. Firstly, PDS
beneficiaries place high value on the perceived security of material rations, which is
not seen as guaranteed in the case of replacement with a monthly sum of cash.
Secondly, the trusted routine of monthly visits to the ration shops is portrayed by
respondents as a highly valued practice, relied upon as means to ensure a safe ration of
basic-need goods for the household.10 Third, a minority of respondents have pointed
out issues of unequal access to finances within the house, displaying the concern that
male household members may divert cash benefits away from their purpose. While all
these reasons to prefer food to cash were put forward, recipients displayed limited
awareness of the purposeful link between the Aadhaar-based PDS and the objective to
shift to a system of direct benefits constructed through the JAM trinity.
51 To sum up, the history of the Aadhaar-based PDS recounted here reveals the
transformative power that biometric technologies, reconstructing the last mile of the
scheme’s supply chain, yield on anti-poverty programs. If not inscribed in its policy
context, such transformation may be seen as an incremental fix, consisting in the
provision of biometric security to combat the issue of market diversion. But the policy
intention behind it, that of transitioning to a cash transfer system that eliminates the
distortions and opportunities for leakage brought about by subsidy, marks a radical
change in the program’s architecture, whose ability of enacting effective pro-poor
structures remains to be assessed. Viewed in this light, the biometric reconstruction of
the PDS constitutes a political transformation that will have substantial consequences
on the entitlements of program recipients.

Discussion
52 This section positions the argument on biometrically-induced transformation of the
PDS into two streams of literature, one of which pertains to coded citizenship and
especially to the debate on datafication of anti-poverty programs within it. The second
stream is centered on Indian social policy and on the need to find ways to combat the
exclusion errors that persist in spite of the biometric transformation of the scheme
(Drèze and Khera 2017; Khera 2019).

Coded Citizenship: Datafication of Anti-Poverty Programs

53 The notion of coded citizenship refers to the transformation of populations into data,
as a result of which the citizen becomes machine-readable as an ensemble of data
(Srinivasan and Johri 2014). This concept is increasingly interpreted as the datafication
of populations (Rao and Nair 2019), and seen in historical continuity with the
technologies of rule used to administer subjects in colonial times. The lens of citizen-
state relations is widely used to study India’s Aadhaar, both as a top-down means of
control and surveillance and as an infrastructure through which India’s residents

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access the state (cf. Bhatia and Bhabha 2017; Chaudhuri and König 2018; Hosein and
Whitley 2019; Singh 2019; Rao 2019; Nair 2019). Viewing the incorporation of Aadhaar
as the latest phase of a longer process of PDS computerization, my research presents
some reflections for this debate.
54 First, as a datafier of the population of Indian residents, Aadhaar converts individual
recipients of programs such as the PDS into machine-readable data. By its own nature,
this process allows the automatization of two functions of the scheme: the recognition
of entitled vs. non-entitled users and the assignation of entitlements according to data
(Masiero and Das 2019). While the same functions were present in the manual PDS,
Aadhaar makes them data-mediated in ways that change not only the architecture of
the program, but also recipients’ ways to access their entitlements. This leads to the
point that datafication acquires a particular meaning when related to anti-poverty
schemes, which opens a new area of enquiry—here termed the datafication of anti-
poverty programs—centered specifically on the effects of data on program
architectures and recipients’ entitlements.
55 Secondly, the work presented here subscribes to the stream which considers Aadhaar
in relation to how residents see the state (Chaudhuri and König 2018; Rao 2019). In
particular, my data suggest that citizens “form an image” of the state that is directly
mediated by technology, which hence should be studied through the direct encounters
of PDS recipients with it (Masiero 2017). The volume of Aadhaar ethnographies edited
by Rao and Nair (2019) focuses specifically on such encounters, offering multiple
perspectives on how these are embedded in the lives of residents. This suggests that, in
studying datafied anti-poverty programs, it is important to combine studies of
infrastructural power (such as, for example, the designers’ perspective offered by
Singh 2019) with the study of local-level encounters, through the technology-mediated
spaces in which the citizen encounters the state.
56 In addition, the concept of data justice—recent but prominent in the literature of
datafication—proves useful in exploring cases of datafied schemes such as the Aadhaar-
mediated PDS. The object of a recent debate (Dencik et al. 2019), the notion of data
justice indicates “fairness in the way people are made visible, represented and treated
as a result of their production of digital data” (Taylor 2017:1). Literature on data justice
investigates representations of people in a datafied world, addressing issues of fairness
and security which have global relevance (Dencik et al. 2019); issues which are still
particularly relevant in the Global South in the light of datafied anti-poverty schemes
and of the structural drivers that influence the condition of the world’s poor (Heeks
and Renken 2018).
57 Quoting Masiero and Das (2019), the data presented in my research of the Aadhaar-
based PDS reveal three limitations to the enactment of data justice in datafied anti-
poverty programs. A first limitation, of a legal nature, shows how the Aadhaar-based
PDS—while remaining within the boundaries of constitutionality—confines access to
enrolled residents, effectively subordinating the right-to-food to registration in a
biometric identification scheme. This echoes the point by Ramanathan (2014) that the
poor have no choice when it comes to enrolment as in the new scheme registration is
an essential requirement for receiving any form of social protection. While advocates
maintain that welfare objectives justify the conditionality of social protection to
registration, fieldwork shows a lacuna for those recipients for whom lack of biometric
recognition is a cause for denial of rations.

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58 Two more limitations to data justice emerge from the research, whose natures are
respectively design-related and informational (Masiero and Das 2019). A design-related
limit relates to the finding that the Aadhaar-based PDS focuses on inclusion errors,
while biometric recognition technology leaves exclusion errors unattended. In terms of
the informational aspect, the limitation lies in the incompleteness of information
received by PDS beneficiaries on the transformative goal of Aadhaar. In contrast, this
goal which is mirrored by the very structure and enactment of the JAM trinity
technologies is clear in the Economic Survey 2014-2015, the report with which the JAM
trinity was launched:

(…) the JAM Number Trinity can be seamlessly linked, and all subsidies rolled
into one or a few monthly transfers, real progress in terms of direct income
support to the poor may finally be possible. The heady prospect for the
Indian economy is that, with strong investments in state capacity, that
Nirvana today seems within reach. It will be a Nirvana for two reasons: the
poor will be protected and provided for; and many prices in India will be
liberated to perform their role of efficiently allocating resources in the
economy and boosting long run growth. (Government of India 2015:65).

When talking to PDS users however, this broader goal has very seldom been brought up
by interviewees, while Aadhaar is mostly considered in the context of encounters with
it—in the ration shops where the PDS is accessed—and therefore, as an instrument for
improvement of the PDS rather than for enactment of broader change. Conversely, the
underlying JAM trinity goal of moving from subsidies to a cash transfers system does
not appear in conversations with beneficiaries, whose attitudes towards such a move,
as it emerges from interviews, are generally suspicious. These limits to data justice,
seen in a case of datafication of a large social protection system, require further
research in the domain of datafication of anti-poverty programs.
59 Finally, a limitation lies in the lens this research has adopted. Citizen-state relations
surely offer a lens through which to read the Aadhaar case, and it does make sense to
use such a lens in a case in which Aadhaar mediates a state-led program such as the
PDS. Yet other researchers, for example Solanki (2019), warn about the limitations of
the citizen-state lens, which does not contemplate many aspects—such as intra-
bureaucratic relations—that should be discussed in a program which regulates people’s
lives not only as citizens but also as workers and consumers. While limited by the
Supreme Court verdict of 2018, the ubiquity of Aadhaar invites us to consider
perspectives that look beyond the sheer domain of the state-citizen relation.

Social Policy: Combating the Exclusion Error

60 In the aftermath of the Aadhaar Bill and of the Supreme Court verdict on the
constitutionality of the program, the Aadhaar-based transformation of social
protection schemes has been at the center of the Indian social policy debate. As shown
in this paper, over the last decade the PDS has been profoundly transformed by digital
and biometric technologies. Technological transformation, coupled with the constant
need for secure social protection for the Indian poor, calls for reflection on how state-
level computerized PDS can combat the exclusion errors that persist in it. This is in line
with the NFSA goal to provide PDS foodgrains to around two thirds of the Indian
population, and three core considerations emerge from my research.

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61 First, as observed over time in both fieldwork states, it is important to design

technologies that involve the early stages of the PDS supply chain. In particular, digital
systems of allocation and monitoring play a major role in tackling issues of diversion
that occur before goods reach the ration shops. By doing so they tackle the crucial node
of diversion, since substantial portions of leakage occur during the important, but
under monitored stages of transportation and storage (Khera 2011b). While political
appeal of front-end technologies is comparatively greater, back-end systems are of
fundamental importance in restructuring the PDS, and they play a major role in
extending the actual coverage of the program.
62 Second, technology has a role in combating the root causes of diversion, including the
pressures for ration dealers to find secure sources of income after the crisis induced by
targeting. In the aftermath of the shift to a targeted system, some states have resorted
to credit concessions to ration dealers (Swaminathan 2008), while others have allowed
sales of non-PDS commodities in ration shops to ensure business continuity. Others,
however, have used technology to ensure that all ration shops receive their theoretical
requirement and are enabled to conduct business. If technology can be used to
strengthen the PDS in its current form, this suggests that there are alternatives to
dismantling the system in favor of direct transfers, and the use of technology for
strengthening the existing PDS should be compared and contrasted with that
possibility (Masiero 2015; Khera 2017).
63 A recent study by Allu, Deo and Devalkar (2019) offers a thorough review of the
alternatives to Aadhaar-based biometrics in the PDS. The authors propose a taxonomy
of methods along three dimensions: “mode of authentication, biometric or non-
biometric, source of authentication, central database connected through internet or
locally stored data in the point of sale device (ePoS), frequency of authentication, at
every transaction or once for a predefined number of transactions” (Allu, Deo and
Devalkar 2019:2). Based on the experience of digitized PDS in eight different states, the
authors observe how most benefits in performance are associated with the use of
biometrics during registration, while biometric authentication at ration shops is not
systematically associated to more effective systems. In the light of these results, it is
important that states evaluate different alternatives before scaling up Aadhaar-based
identification to all their ration shops.
64 In another study, Khera (2018) observes that other options than Aadhaar
authentication at the ration shop are available to monitor PDS leakage. She reviews two
different options: in Chhattisgarh’s COREPDS experiment, which began in 2012, ration
shop transactions were enabled by smart cards with an embedded memory chip, hence
every transaction was recorded on the chip and uploaded online. In Tamil Nadu, QR-
coded smart cards maintain a digital trail of all transactions, using a smart card reader
in the ration shop—in lieu of the Aadhaar-enabled point of sale machine. Comparing
these two alternatives to Aadhaar-based biometric authentication, Khera highlights the
significant advantages of such alternatives, observing that smart cards—be them QR-
coded, or with embedded memory chips—offer substantial advantages, also enabling
immobile persons (such as the elderly) to rely on other persons to fetch PDS
commodities.
65 Finally, as a consequence of the need to minimize exclusion errors, the state-level
experiences reviewed here highlight the importance of backup mechanisms for user
recognition. There is a particularly pressing need for measures of this type, since

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disempowerment caused by user exclusion compensates the theoretical benefits that

computerization may bring. In an earlier study of Karnataka (Masiero and
Prakash 2015) it had emerged that, in a limited number of ration shops, ration dealers
resorted to paper-based records of transactions to bypass the point-of-sale machine in
case of malfunctioning. This was, however, not the case when we returned to the field
in 2018. More encompassing mechanisms of redressal are needed, especially after the
Aadhaar Bill enabled state-level systems to become entirely Aadhaar-based. While
enrolment is now very high among Indian residents, failure of Aadhaar-based
authentication still occurs, and to effectively ensure the right to food to it needs to be
integrated with alternative forms of authentication or state-level databases.

Conclusion
66 From the research on computerization of the PDS presented here, two final
considerations can be drawn on the relation between technology developments and
social welfare systems. Firstly, the hegemonic narrative on technology-induced leaps in
the effectiveness of social protection systems is problematized by the considerations
offered here. What we witness in the biometric PDS is a history of winners and losers,
which juxtaposes reform with problems of exclusion, technological malfunctioning and
undesired shifts in the making of program governance. While digital tools may well be
entrenched in program improvement, technical errors related to access entitlement
and data injustices may become equally pervasive, and prevent the system from
achieving the goals of effective coverage that were established for it.
67 Secondly, the JAM trinity-enabled move from PDS to cash transfers needs careful
evaluation to avoid exacerbation of the exclusion errors that already affect the system.
While such transition is still under discussion, its risks and benefits should be balanced
against those of technologies that preserve the existing PDS instead of dismantling it.
State-level stories of PDS reform lead to the argument that an alternative to cash
transfers is possible, and would avoid the major costs and disruption that transition to
the new system would entail, even if implemented and phased in gradually across the
nation. Hence, alternative options need to be evaluated, in the light of the ability of
each proposed solution to provide secure entitlements to PDS recipients.

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NOTES
1. Sections of this manuscript have been adapted from my unpublished doctoral dissertation
(Masiero 2014).
2. In this paper I refer to the PDS as a food security program because, although non-food items
(e.g. kerosene) are also subsidised under the program, the scheme has the primary purpose of
guaranteeing adequate nutrition to all Indian citizens. “Foodgrains”—primarily rice and wheat—
is the staple commodity in the scheme, and the term is often used to refer to PDS subsidised
commodities at large.
3. Other scholars (Deaton 2003; Sundaram and Tendulkar 2003) claim that poverty decline in the
1990s has proceeded in line with earlier trends. This is based on controversy over different
interpretations of data from the 61st round of the National Sample Survey (NSS).
4. The literature ascribes famines in colonial India to a combination of natural causes, such as
mismatches between demand and supply induced primarily by crop failures, and man-made
causes, notably political action that has adverse effects on redistribution (Roy 2016:2). See
Bhatia (1991) for an in-depth historiography of famines in precolonial and colonial times and
Roy (2016) for a review of theories regarding their relative causes.
5. The existence of the urban bias is, however, questioned by several studies (e.g. Dev and
Suryanarayana 1991; Suryanarayana 1995) on the grounds that different measurements lead to
different distributional outcomes.
6. Retrieved November 15, 2019 (https://uidai.gov.in/about-uidai.html).
7. Retrieved November 15, 2019 (https://uidai.gov.in/images/state-wise-aadhaar-saturation.pdf).

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8. Retrieved November 18, 2019 (http://www.livemint.com/Politics/BfeNi5AreTn1cJ8ROIzxXM/

NDA-kicks-off-PDS-reforms.html).
9. Retrieved November 18, 2019 ( https://scroll.in/article/805909/in-rajasthan-there-is-unrest-
at-the-ration-shop-because-of-error-ridden-aadhaar).
10. This might, however, be a consequence of the general good functioning of PDS in Karnataka,
which performs better than most Indian states on PDS offtake (Khera 2011b). While we have not
surveyed states which lag behind on PDS performance, it is possible that such states may display
lower reliance of users on ration shops.

ABSTRACTS
This paper reflects on the author’s nine-year research on the transformation of India’s Public
Distribution System (PDS) enacted through digital technologies first and, more recently, through
Aadhaar’s biometric infrastructure. Based on the experiences of two states, Kerala and
Karnataka, which adopted biometric identification in their ration shops, the paper illustrates the
effects of the transition to an Aadhaar-based PDS, on both program governance and recipients’
entitlements. It argues that, while designed with the objective of combating the rice mafia
resulting in foodgrain diversion, a biometric PDS does not prevent the exclusion errors
pervading the program, and supports the transition to a cash transfer system whose
developmental outcomes are still uncertain. Contributing to the debate on coded citizenship in
South Asia, this paper reflects on the transformative power that biometric infrastructures yield
over food security schemes, and considers different ways a computerized PDS may be tailored for
the inclusion of vulnerable groups.

INDEX
Keywords: biometric infrastructures, Public Distribution System, food security, anti-poverty
policy, Aadhaar, India

AUTHOR
SILVIA MASIERO
Department of Informatics, University of Oslo

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