Aadhaar: Governing with Biometrics

Aadhaar means ‘foundation’ or ‘support’ in several Indian languages. Utter the word ‘aadhaar’ anywhere across the length and breadth of India today, and you will most certainly evoke India’s national biometric identification programme, the largest of its kind anywhere in the world. By the year 2019, the government had issued a twelvedigit unique ID to nearly every adult resident in India, linked to minimal biometric (fingerprints, iris scan data and facial photograph) and biographical (name, age, gender, address) information in a centralised database. India’s use of biometrics for identification is not an isolated case—many countries are currently in the throes of experimenting with biometric identification systems that use smart cards or central databases. Aadhaar qualifies as a frontier case, with over 1.2 billion enrollees in its system. India’s Aadhaar is likely to influence developments in other countries not merely by virtue of being larger than similar projects. According to the World Bank, this national ID platform is pioneering because it offers unparalleled interoperability—it could potentially serve as the one universal identity gateway for all of a person’s interactions with a multiplicity of state and private bodies. Proponents of Aadhaar are confident that its innovative technology and design will solve what is deemed a national identification ‘crisis’—a large proportion of the population lacking incontrovertible, unassailable and universally recognised IDs. Opponents counter that Aadhaar adds to the hardships of citizens by divorcing identification from the granting of rights, relying unwarrantedly on bodily impressions, and potentially facilitating micro-surveillance and undemocratic forms of rule. This special section takes an ethnographic approach and studies Aadhaar empirically as a series of practices to better understand its multiple effects. Aadhaar comes into being through the performance of countless acts of planning, imagining, programming, enrolling, using, inspecting, recording and networking. Ethnographic emphasis on the social world of Aadhaar can help unpack its official technocratic script and also reveal how Aadhaar animates—and is animated in—the everyday. Focusing on different social sites, each paper in this collection follows the workings of Aadhaar closely, both as a concept and as the immaterial twelve-digit mover of everyday life. Bringing together