par Nicolas BELORGEY
First published, in Global policy, Volume 14, Issue 5, November 2023, pp. 949-957
1 INTRODUCTION
In the era of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), the deployment of a digital and biometric ID system, named Aadhaar (‘foundation’ in Hindi), in India from 2009 onwards, strongly disputed but spreading in many Southern countries, deserves special attention. It is today common understanding that the implementation of Aadhaar under the Unique ID Authority of India (UIDAI) has been more or less won by its proponents since the much-awaited decision by the Supreme Court in 2018. Thus, it may be deemed a battle, which was considered to be lost by the opponents, as one of them told me during an informal discussion in Delhi (2019).
The literature on the project is extensive and varied. Firstly, thousands of newspaper articles, digital web pages and reports have been written by different stakeholders and analysts. Secondly, several Bills and Acts have been presented or adopted in the Parliament. The Supreme Court rendered multiple orders and two landmark judgements in connection with the project (in 2017 on privacy and in 2018 on Aadhaar itself). Thirdly, at least six books have been dedicated to it, spanning from directly involved builders of the project (Nilekani & Shah, 2015; Sharma, 2020) and activists opposed to it (Thomas, 2018) to quite apologetic accounts by journalists (Aiyar, 2017; Ramnath & Assisi, 2018) as well as a critical academic analysis (Khera, 2019). Fourthly, there are also three special issues of journals, dwelling on citizenship, governance, identity and digital studies (Chhotray & McConnell, 2018; Masiero & Shakthi, 2020; Rao & Nair, 2019). The scope of the present text allows us to mention only a few. I consider grey and legal literature as primary sources and rely on academic literature for scientific discussion.
One stream of literature insists on the entrepreneurial origins of the project, stressing in an activist mode that it serves certain business interests (e.g. Ramanathan, 2010), or in a more academic way that it would embody the neoliberal turn in political economy that is unfolding in India since economic liberalisation in 1991, turning citizens into consumers in the data state (e.g. Chaudhuri & König, 2018; Khan, 2021). However stimulating is this stream, it gives little evidence of the precise reasons why corporate actors are interested in the development of such a data state in India. This text intends to address this gap. In other words, it addresses the question: Why some players in the corporate world needed a biometric ID?
It is not my thesis that an omnipotent, united corporate world is building a surveillance society. This world is too divided and lacks the coercive capacity of the state. However, one can understand that some actors took steps to build some tools. More precisely, beyond its branding as a ‘unique’ ID or a ‘biometric revolution’, Aadhaar can be analysed from a technical perspective as an ID made up of two components: a digital ID, that is a personal identifier that can be included in digital, remotely accessible databases; and a biometric ID, using technologies such as fingerprint and iris analysis. I will therefore focus on players interested in each of these components. In addition to these structural factors, the deployment of Aadhaar cannot be understood without the intervention of Nandan Nilekani, CEO and the then chairman of the IT firm Infosys, as well as chairman of the UIDAI during the first years of the project (2009–2013). I will thus dedicate special attention to him.
To avoid anachronism, looking back at yesterday’s world through today’s lenses, I consider the situation prior to the launch of Aadhaar, around 2007. This paper aims neither to describe the present situation nor to make moral judgements, but to understand the mechanisms through which some corporate actors were interested in the launch of a digital and biometric ID at that time. Thus, I adopt a purely descriptive stance. My methodology is a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1998) with the initial historical context setting. I followed proponent and opponent networks countrywide, conducting 70 interviews with corporate actors, central and local government officers, NGOs, activists, lawyers and politicians (five of which are particularly relevant here and I directly mention, the rest being set aside for later work). I also use as sources the above-mentioned grey literature. This ethnography includes a participant observation as an MBA student preparing to work with the Indian IT industry. This text is the first of a broader project, stemming from a 2-year fieldwork on Aadhaar and aiming at a book on the subject. The remaining of this text explains why IDs matter to the digital industry (2), why new digital IDs were needed in the South (3), the economic interests of the biometric industry (4), its links with political interests (IV) and eventually shedding some light on the main architect of the project (5).
2 WHY IDs MATTER TO THE IT INDUSTRY
Identifying users is a powerful tool for the IT industry. Computer scientist Roger Clarke (1988; quoted by Cheney-Lippold, 2017, p. 21) warns against the coming of a ‘dossier society’ and an age of ‘dataveillance’, that he defines as ‘the systematic monitoring of people’s action or communications through the application of information technology’. For this to become a reality, along with sociologist David Lyon (1994, pp. 48–49), he argues that only three things are needed: a range of personal databases, a telecommunication network to connect them and ‘a consistent identification scheme’. The first two elements are already in place.
With regard to the third element, the consistent identification scheme, D. Lyon stressed that traditional identifiers such as names and dates of birth cannot be trusted, because of recording errors and similarities between people. Meanwhile in the Global North, resistance to such new identification schemes is very strong, as exemplified by refusals of populations to adopt them in Australia (1987), in the UK (1991, 2005) or in the United States (2005 onwards). In these countries, people argue that their civil liberties would be harmed by a dossier society and see little advantage in setting up such schemes. Therefore, the industry tends to use instead social security numbers as identifiers. However, these numbers are not universal, since their use is rather limited to social policy.
In spite of the resistances of the populations, D. Lyon continues, such schemes are ‘eagerly sought as a means of maximising efficiency and minimising cost’ for the industry. They are called ‘in the jargon’ Universal Personal Identifiers (UPIs). So, it appears that the Indian digital ID is a form of UPI in an already old IT jargon—D. Lyon wrote in 1994. Moreover, the proponents of Aadhaar eventually recognised that it could somehow infringe on the civil rights of the people, but insisted that it would be the price to pay to enhance their dire material situation. Such an argument could be successful in southern countries only. If UPIs are resisted in northern, rich countries whose populations can afford to insist on their civil rights, the global South, with still a considerable poor population, would offer a much more open playground for developing them.
Clarke and Lyon’s analysis also allows to clear an enduring misunderstanding about Aadhaar and privacy. The proponents always argued that people’s data were safe with them and that the UIDAI database could not endanger privacy as it contained only minimalist information. Some of the opponents counter-attacked on the point of data leakages in the enrolment and authentication processes. We can now look at the broader picture, taking into account not only the ID but also the equation: ID + existing databases + interlinking system, to understand that Aadhaar was nothing but the keystone to allow a ‘dossier society’ in the sense of Clarke, be there leakages or not.
3 WHY WERE NEW DIGITAL IDs NEEDED IN THE SOUTH?
Aadhaar not only allows the interlinking of pre-existing databases, but it also replaces the most useful ‘cookies’ (also known as ‘persistent identifiers’) in low-Internet settings like southern countries. To understand this characteristic, one must go back to the basics of the digital economy. As explained in a US context by Bruce Schneier (2015, Chapters 1–3), the data we give birth to are weaving around us an always closer web. First of all, they may be considered as a ‘by-product’ (title of his Chapter 1) of our daily activities, be it computing, carrying our cell phone (locating us is necessary so that it can convey calls to us), shopping (unless we buy everything in cash) and so on. Then, these data are collected as a joint activity by firms and national security agencies from a surveillance perspective. Then, our data are analysed, so that for instance, someone who would like to go unnoticed on the Internet would be immediately identified. Of special interest for our research, data mining operates by ‘linking identities across different data sets to draw inference from the combined data’. Law professor Daniel Solove (2004) warned against the development of ‘digital dossiers’, collections of detailed data about individuals threatening our privacy. He quoted, among others, the firm Acxiom.com, which already provided ‘over 50 demographic variables (…) including age, income, real property data, children’s data (…), education levels, occupation, height, weight, political affiliation, ethnicity, race, hobbies, and net worth’ (p. 3).
However, this interlinking of data requires common IDs or UPI, as Clarke would put it. On the Internet, this task is performed by ‘cookies’. Invented in 1994 by Netscape, the first commercial web browser company (Zuboff, 2019: 83) and initially a mere device to make web surfing easier, they developed tools to track users across many different websites. Thanks to this identification of people, some players in the United States are able to extract considerable economic value. For instance, cookies enable them to adjust prices based on what the clients would accept to pay, thus arming them with the means to make the consumer spend more than they had initially intended, as illustrated in the well-known case of air ticket prices, which rise with each visit that a particular user makes on the seller’s website. More broadly speaking, these corporate players are able to extract what Zuboff (2019, Chapter 3) has rightly termed ‘behavioral surplus’. The first of these actors is undoubtedly Google.
The way I got enrolled in my MBA illustrates the ongoing power of these tools. Since I was repeatedly making searches on the Internet on the digital sector in India from my Delhi office, and my other biographical elements stated that I had already graduated and was working with a company, I soon started seeing advertisements appear on my browser, proposing a training to ‘become a data analyst’ in India, and therefore considerably enhance my revenues. I must say it was an interesting proposal, not that I wanted to change my company nor make money, but because I was looking for a way to understand better how the Indian IT sector was functioning. What a better way to do that, than to receive training where all the necessary skills, the dos and don’ts, and the work perspectives, would be carefully explained to newbies? In ethnography, taking such a training is common practice, as it is a way of conducting a participant observation. Moreover, a quick survey of the market showed that the firm which targeted me indeed proposed training of a satisfactory standard. What interested me the most was the possible access to major Indian (and perhaps US) IT firms. I could even think of this institution as a joint venture of those firms to train a common labour force, in the context of high demand for semi-qualified work in their sector. So, I bought the formation, for a substantial amount. The targeting had succeeded.
Needless to say that a business plan such as Google’s is possible only through the reliable identification of people. If one does not know for sure who is behind the keyboard or the mouse, then the behaviour prediction accuracy drops, and with it the profits of the company. Had I not been comfortably sitting in my New Delhi office behind my computer (powered by my employer with the help of Microsoft and therefore without any protection against trackers), I would never have been targeted this way. So, for the common man in India, who represents most of its population and did not have either a computer or a personal smartphone in 2007, this way of targeting does not work. Another way has to be invented. Beyond the relatively well-charted context of the Internet and northern countries, the identification of individuals must use tools other than cookies.

In addition, as R.S. Sharma, UIDAI’s first CEO, reminded me (interview, Delhi, December 2019), in India, many people bear the same name, which can, moreover, be spelt differently in different identity documents of the same person; their date of birth is uncertain; the address may be vague (‘behind the temple …’) and may change, particularly for migrant workers, who are also of a sizable number. Therefore, the usual identifiers such as name or date of birth on official documents are even less to be trusted than already stressed by Lyon in northern countries’ settings.
In India, several elements make the situation even more difficult. To start with, the GDP per capita allows few people to buy a smartphone, even less a computer. Even if they do, there remain in the country huge problems with access to electricity and Internet connectivity. On top of that, illiteracy is still a plague for the country. With only 74% in 2006, the female literacy rate in the younger age (15–24) was lower in India than in all other South Asian countries except Pakistan (61%), with Nepal and Bangladesh at 78%, and Sri Lanka at 99% (Drèze & Sen, 2013, p. 113). Around the same year, the female literacy rate in East Asian countries ranged between 96% (Vietnam) and 99% (China, Indonesia, etc.). As a consequence, when Google tried to establish its position in India, it financed workers to go to villages and show groups of women how a Google search could be performed on a smartphone using no keyboard but just voice and receiving the result in the form of a sheer video (Agrawal, 2018, pp. 3–7). When one cannot write nor read, the solution would be, for IT firms to interact with the population, voice recognition and images or video screening. Another IT giant, Facebook, tried to implant itself deeper into India by granting free Internet access to its users. But as the offer concerned its own services only, it violated the principle of Internet neutrality and was therefore turned down.

As a result of these elements, the penetration of Internet in India is relatively low. As shown by Figure 1, the gap between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries is striking. Prior to Aadhaar, for instance in, 2006, this rate was 54% for the former and 9% for the latter. On a world map of the proportion of Internet users by country in 2007 (Figure 2), Central Asia, most of South Asia and nearly all of Africa appear to have the lowest rates, below 10%. Northern America, Europe, Australia and Japan are by comparison the countries with the highest penetration rates, above 60%. However, this contrast is quite blurred on a second map (Figure 3), showing for the same year the raw numbers: Due to its huge population, India appears on the same level, 20–50 million Internet users, as countries like France or Canada. Hence, India is a place where usual identifiers like cookies are of little help and at the same time a place with considerable potential for some IT firms to test new recipes, thanks to its huge population and the high skill level of a part of it.

Not all corporate players face this situation. For instance, Google has little use of a new digital ID since it has its own, powerful identification system (interview with IT activist Anivar Aravind, Bangalore, January 2021):
Google has a leverage in India because they own 90%–95% of the market with Android. They have a direct customer language (…). Android have a platform for some day. They already have enough data (…). What they do with Google Pay is basically much more than any speech platform [like Facebook] will do. So at the same time they don’t need direct investment in civil society (…). And that makes sense, they basically invest in the infrastructure, internet access like public Wi-Fi and everything, which is basically low-reflection investment.
Therefore, in the coalition that will promote Aadhaar, Google is hard to find, contrary to other major players like Omidyar or credit providers who lack personal identifiers as reliable as those accessed by the owner of Android.
Hence, in the Global South, a digital ID based not on Internet connections but allowing the same kind of targeting of people as cookies do, was a precondition of the usual IT sector plan to be deployed. If successful, it could also be deployed in other India-like countries in the world map (Figure 2).
4 ECONOMIC INTERESTS OF THE BIOMETRIC INDUSTRY
If digital IDs are profitable, a further step is made when considering biometric identification of people. According to some biometric specialists, their discipline could be a huge source of savings, amounting in 1999 to at least $5.5 billion annually for the United States only, by eliminating fraudulent recipients of welfare, credit card frauds, smartphone theft and some other issues (Jain et al., 1999, p. 2).
In the United States, the development of biometric devices is closely tied to that of the prison industrial complex (Magnet, 2011, Chapter 2). The first biometric readers such as hand geometry scanners, retinal scanners and automated fingerprint identification systems (AFIS) were developed from 1960 onwards. It was promoted among others by the FBI and the firm Wackenhut, a key player in the privatisation of prisons. ‘In attempting to pitch their products to a broad market’, writes Canadian criminologist Shoshana Magnet, ‘access control was one of the key ways of speaking about the utility of biometric technologies’. Prisons were ideal places to practice access control. Moreover, ‘a prison (…) has a captive audience and can make the user of a biometric device perform the actions required for passing as many times as it likes until it is satisfied. Who cares if the customer doesn’t like it?’ (Glave, 1997, cited in Magnet, 2011 p. 63). US prisons expanded considerably since 1970 onwards with the criminalisation of poverty, so that around 2000 the country represented 5% of the world population but 25% of the world’s prisoners (and with an over-representation of poor people and people of colour). In the 1970s, in addition to Wackenhut, companies such as the American Fingermatrix, the Japanese NEC and the French Morpho deployed AFIS and in turn benefited from the public budgets that funded the prisons. In 1989, the US administration set up an AFIS to control immigrants at the border. In 1994, the FBI launched an initiative to develop an Integrated AFIS (IAFIS), interconnecting the multiple existing AFIS and which by 2008 ‘provides automated fingerprint search capabilities (…), electronic image storage (…) and responses (…) to criminal ten-print fingerprinting submissions [sent electronically] within two hours’ (p. 57).
The similarities with what the UIDAI will provide are striking. First, in both cases, there is a central agency which keeps the electronic records of a population and responds to remote queries of 10 fingerprint matching with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer within a short time span. This ‘world’s largest biometric database’ (p. 57) is by the way a reference for Shankkar Aiyar (2017), the journalist who wrote the first apologetic story about Aadhaar, in which he explains that the latter has become bigger than the model. Secondly, the many failures of Aadhaar authentications reported by the Indian activists sound like echoes of the not important failures noted in the US prisons, people being just asked in both cases to try again until authentication succeeds.
After the prisons, the biometric industry in the United States took to welfare, another captive audience (Magnet, 2011, Chapter 3). Starting with California in 1991, eight of the US States had biometric programmes for identifying welfare recipients by 2000. Aided by a 1996 law, firms like Maximus or Lockheed Martin made significant profits. However, the results were poor. Firstly, they were made mostly at the expense of welfare recipients. The amount of complaints grew tremendously, protesting against disrespectful treatment by the staff, gender, race, class and disability discrimination with no timely treatment of their requests. The companies dramatically reduced the welfare rolls ‘although it quickly became clear that deserving recipients were repeatedly dropped from the register – falsely represented by the companies (…) as testament to the success of privatization [thanks to the savings generated]’. Secondly, the cost–benefit analysis shows rather a loss in public funds. Although the firms pretended to eliminate duplicate aid fraud, in many States, only a very small numbers of such cases were found, compared with huge amounts disbursed to set up the system. For instance in New York, which started to use biometric methods in 1995 for around $45 million of expenses, with the hope of saving between $250 and $297 million in the first 2 years, a study found in 1997 that only 172 cases had been dropped as a result of fraud, many more being dropped from the roll for other reasons. Although New York expanded its programme, other states closed theirs due to similar results: Maryland, which found that fewer than 4% of cases were due to fraud, and North Carolina, due to the cost incurred.
Indian economist and social rights activist Reetika Khera explicitly compares the situation in the United States and in India (interview, Ahmedabad, January 2020):
If you read Shoshana Magnet’s book (…), she documents very clearly how this technology is developed in the defense sector, in the defense industry (…). She finds that when technology is developed, then they start looking for commercial applications. So the first thing they go after is the prison population. So they deployed in the prison industry in the US, but even those volumes are not enough to turn out profits for the biometric industry, so they looked for the next best, or the next most vulnerable population after the prisoners, and it’s the welfare. She documents very clearly that it was exactly the same narrative as in India: duplication on the welfare roles, duplication on the welfare roles… The lack of evidence on duplication is presented to the people as evidence of its existence. Just because we lack numbers, that means it’s a serious problem! (laughing). I am sorry, that logic does not work for me. But it clearly worked, both in America as well as in India.
One must acknowledge that the similarities between the deployment of biometric IDs in the United States and India are striking. First, the IDs are promoted in the name of a cost–benefit analysis for welfare that later proves at least dubious and then the promoters insist on identity fraud in welfare, leading to duplicates in the rolls, ignoring other problems, like low enforcement of rights. Furthermore, the people dropped from the roll for any reason are presented as being dropped for fraud, although it may be due to the malfunctioning of the programme, while it is difficult to cross-check this affirmation. To sum up, from a public policy perspective, the rights of the recipients are much less protected than those of the funders of the programme, which means, from a political perspective, that the cursor moves from a rather progressive position, insisting on welfare distribution, to a rather conservative one, Reagan-style, insisting on welfare fraud.
After South Asia, the biometric IDs entered other southern countries in America, Africa and South-East Asia, under the aegis of the World Bank (CHRGJ, 2022). The hypothesis of the biometric industry pursuing its own agenda is supported by observations made on African countries (Debos, 2021; Debos & Desgranges, forthcoming). Although locals are also key actors in promoting these technologies, Africa appears as a lucrative business for companies which sell biometric devices, cards or other materials.
5 POLITICAL TIES OF THE BIOMETRIC INDUSTRY
The reasons why biometric IDs are promoted worldwide may not only be economical but also political. A secret telegram dated 3 July 2009 from the US post in Islamabad reports a conversation between the secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Janet Napolitano on the one hand, and Pakistani officials: President Asif Zardari, Prime Minister Yousef Gilani and Minister of Interior Rehman Malik, on the other hand (Patterson, 2009). Napolitano had come to discuss the possibility for the United States to get data on the passengers flying from Pakistan to the United States, while the Pakistani people stressed the need to get aid from the United States to secure the Afghan border, being used by the militants more and more to cross over due to the Afghan war. They also reminded the Americans of their promise of direct flights from Lahore to New York, in return for buying Boeing aircraft in 2004. Malik ‘offered to share Nadra-generated information on Pakistani citizens, within the constraints imposed by privacy concerns’, of which passenger’s information could be a subset. He agreed ‘to set up a joint task force to work out the way forward’. About privacy, Malik mentioned that a law committee assessment was under process and a legal challenge in the Supreme Court was to be avoided, as it ‘is also imperative that Pakistan not be perceived by the public as “working for America” on this’. In a later discussion with future Prime Minister Imran Khan (Assange & Khan, 2012), Julian Assange made reference to this telegram and asserted that a company set up in the UK, International Identity Services, which served as consultants for Nadra, ‘squirrel[ed] out the data for all of Pakistan’, and all of that could be ‘a theft of some national treasure of Pakistan’. In response, Khan did not confirm nor deny Assange’s suggestion, dwelling on generalities about the corrupt ruling elite. A quick look on an official British website just confirmed that the firm did exist between 2009 and 2014 (Company information, n.d.). Eventually, in a later article, Indian activist Gopal Krishna (2013a) asserts that ‘Wikileaks revealed that [Nadra] was handed over to US agencies’, with reference to this conversation. To be honest, the collection of telegrams available on Wikileaks does not allow to know for sure whether Pakistan did access or not the pressing demand of DHS in exchange for their much-needed help. What is sure is that the United States, against the background of their ‘war on terror’, did try to get at least a part of the Nadra database with its biometric information and the UK might have succeeded in getting it even earlier, through a counselling society.
It is precisely this process, of foreign countries acquiring data through subcontractors, which might also have occurred with Aadhaar. The reason for this is that the setting up of the Indian ID required a lot of pre-existing software, both open and proprietary, the terms and conditions of which remain unclear. The UIDAI needed above all fingerprint analysis software. This operation involved three companies that UIDAI made compete (Krishna, 2013b and interviews with David, a World Bank agent, Mumbai, February 2020, and with R.S. Sharma, Delhi, January 2020): Morpho, the one we learned about concerning AFIS in the United States, a subsidiary of the French group Safran, partly owned by the French state until 2017; L1 Identity Solutions, a major US supplier of biometric identification worldwide, of which George Tenet, former CIA Director, was a board member; Accenture, the big IT services and consulting company, which outsourced the job to a third party. Japanese NEC (see above) seems to have been involved too. The landscape changed over time, since Accenture stopped working with UIDAI; L1 became Elwan and part of Safran too; and Morpho was sold to a US venture capital fund, Advent International, then renamed Idemia, but the concern remained that through them, the data might be handed over to French or US governments. Activists Gopal Krishna and Mathew Thomas, among others, filed several RTIs in order to get the UIDAI contracts with these firms (Krishna, 2013c; Thomas, 2018, pp. 17–20, 24–27). The UIDAI first declined to give the requested information and then sent truncated documents. After multiple attempts, the applicants got some more elements while the remaining have been under litigation at the Delhi High Court since 2014. From what has been obtained (in particular Annexure A of the contract with L1), it appears that L1 ‘has access to personal information of [UIDAI] and/or a third party or any resident of India’ and that L1 may retain the data for ‘not more than a period of 7 years’. Other clauses too hint at the possibility for L1 to get personal data. Other firms like Ernst & Young are also present as subcontractors, dealing with less sensitive data.
The reasons why foreign countries might be interested in the Indian biometrics are at least twofold. First, for direct security issues, like border surveillance, the way the DHS did in 2009 in Islamabad when searching for Pakistani data. Secondly, as pointed out by IT activist Srinivas Kodali (interview, Hyderabad, July 2021), in order to train their own biometric engines, deduplication being not a deterministic but a probabilistic practice, which gains in accuracy when the database widens.

6 THE ROLE PLAYED BY NANDAN NILEKANI
Besides the structural reasons why some players promoted a biometric ID, a conjunctural but instrumental role has been that of Nandan Nilekani, appointed as the first chairman of UIDAI. In the 2010 Bill, which aimed at giving a legal foundation to the programme, the chapter on the agency is entirely structured on his person. Who exactly is he?
Nilekani was born in 1955 in Bengaluru, the capital of Karnataka. An engineer from the prestigious IIT Bombay, he co-founded Infosys in 1981. Infosys exemplifies the Indian firms that made the most from economic globalisation. Providing services to companies all over the world and as an outsourcing company for major American consulting firms, it produced high value-added specialised know-how, such as business strategy consulting for information systems and their development. An 8-billion-dollar sector in 2000 and a 64-billion-dollar sector in 2008, it reported an annual growth of 40% over this entire period. Infosys reported a turnover of 1.6 million in 1991, 100 million in 1999, around 1 billion in 2003 and 3 billion in 2007. Their clientele included Sainsbury and Airbus. Nilekani was the CEO of Infosys from 2002 to 2007—a phase during which the company expanded rapidly. In 2003, Fortune magazine named him Asia’s Businessman of the Year. In 2006 and 2009, Time magazine ranked him among the 100 most influential people in the world.

Copyright by World Economic Forum swiss-image.ch/Photo by E.T. Studhalter
In 2008, the Great Recession affected the whole world, starting with the United States. Infosys and the IT consulting sector in general saw their markets closing up. Numerous Indians employed in the United States returned home where the job market remained relatively less affected. The same year, Nilekani published a book, Imagining India (Nilekani, 2008), a sort of road map for the country, written from a fairly classical economic liberalism viewpoint, criticising state invention and lauding private enterprise. The chapter on IT in India is very close to what would be set up for Aadhaar, recommending a digital ID and other subsequent innovations. In that sense, Aadhaar is also a way for many firms affected by the 2008 crisis to escape it. Through the digital registration of Indians, Nilekani also opened up the possibility of new markets, for instance in education, a domain in which he also has interests.
In a nutshell, this paper has shown that Aadhaar was needed in order to render the Indian, perhaps the Global South population digitally identifiable and marketable, that is ready to be included in new, digital markets, by corporate players that did not already possess a way to identify people, as Google did. Aadhaar also has been a good opportunity for the biometric industry to expand the scope of its reach, once the UIDAI later decided to use this technique for its identification purpose. Some northern governments possibly benefited from this extension as well, by getting the biometrics of the Indians enrolled.
However, this is only a glimpse of the Aadhaar battle. Missing elements include first the trends in the Indian IT industry since India’s independence, the role of philanthrocapitalists worldwide, the World Bank and the further opportunities offered by a digital ID: opening new markets, be it in banking, credit, health or education, and the perspective of a cashless economy. These elements then include other major players: administrations, political parties, activists, courts, population and the implementation phase. Last but not least, much needs to be written on the results of the project. I intend to cover these areas in further writings.
REFERENCES
- Agrawal, R. (2018) India connected. How the smartphone is transforming the world’s largest democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Aiyar, S. (2017) Aadhaar: a biometric history of India’s 12-digit revolution. Chennai: Westland Publications.
- Assange, J. & Khan, I. (2012) Episode 10 | WikiLeaks World Tomorrow. Available from: https://worldtomorrow.wikileaks.org/episode-10.html [Accessed 13 April 2022]
- Chaudhuri, B. & König, L. (2018) The Aadhaar scheme: a cornerstone of a new citizenship regime in India? Contemporary South Asia, 26(2), 127–142. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2017.1369934 Web of Science®Google Scholar
- Cheney-Lippold, J. (2017) We are data: algorithms and the making of our digital selves. New York: New York University Press. Google Scholar
- Chhotray, V. & McConnell, F. (2018) Certifications of citizenship: the history, politics and materiality of identity documents in south Asian states and diasporas. Contemporary South Asia, 26(2), 111–126. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2018.1471042 Web of Science®Google Scholar
- CHRGJ. (2022) Paving a digital road to hell? A primer on the role of the World Bank and global networks in promoting digital ID. New-York: Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. Available from: https://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Report_Paving-a-Digital-Road-to-Hell.pdf [Accessed 22 June 2022] Google Scholar
- Clarke, R. (1988) Information technology and dataveillance. Communications of the ACM, 31(5), 498–512. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1145/42411.42413 Web of Science®Google Scholar
- Company information. (n.d.) Available from. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/06956966 [Accessed: 14 April 2022] Google Scholar
- Debos, M. (2021) Biometrics and the disciplining of democracy: technology, electoral politics, and liberal interventionism in Chad. Democratization, 28(8), 1406–1422. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2021.1907349 Web of Science®Google Scholar
- Debos, M. & Desgranges, G. (forthcoming) L’invention d’un marché: économie politique de la biométrie électorale en Afrique. Critique internationale [Preprint]. Google Scholar
- Drèze, J. & Sen, A. (2013) An uncertain glory: India and its contradictions, 2nd edition. London: Allen Lane. Google Scholar
- A.K. Jain, R. Bolle & S. Pankanti (Eds.). (1999) Biometrics: personal identification in networked society, 2006th edition. Boston: Kluwer (The Kluwer international series in engineering and computer science, SECS 479). Google Scholar
- Khan, A. (2021) Beyond consent: surveillance capitalism and politics in the data state. India Review, 20(2), 158–175. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.1895563 Web of Science®Google Scholar
- R. Khera (Ed.). (2019) Dissent on Aadhaar: big data meets Big Brother. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Google Scholar
- Krishna, G. (2013a) Aadhaar: Pakistan handed over, India giving database on a platter– part 17. Moneylife, 16 December. Available from: https://www.moneylife.in/article/aadhaar-pakistan-handed-over-india-giving-database-on-a-platter-part-17/35647.html [Accessed 26 July 2021] Google Scholar
- Krishna, G. (2013b) CIA-funded MongoDB partners with UIDAI to handle Aadhaar data –part 13. Moneylife, 3 December. Available from: https://www.moneylife.in/article/cia-funded-mongodb-partners-with-uidai-to-handle-aadhaar-data-part-13/35500.html [Accessed 26 July 2021] Google Scholar
- Krishna, G. (2013c) Surveillance through biometrics-based Aadhaar –part 8. Moneylife, 30 October. Available from: https://www.moneylife.in/article/surveillance-through-biometrics-based-aadhaar-part-8/35091.html [Accessed 26 July 2021] Google Scholar
- Lyon, D. (1994) The electronic eye: the rise of surveillance society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Google Scholar
- Magnet, S. (2011) When biometrics fail: gender, race, and the technology of identity. Durham: Duke University Press. Google Scholar
- Marcus, G.E. (1998) Ethnography through thick and thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Google Scholar
- Masiero, S. & Shakthi, S. (2020) Grappling with Aadhaar: biometrics, social identity and the Indian state. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 1–10, [Preprint], (23). Available from: https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6279 Google Scholar
- Nilekani, N. (2008) Imagining India: ideas for the new century, 2009th edition. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Google Scholar
- Nilekani, N. & Shah, V. (2015) In: S. Halarnkar (Ed.) Rebooting India. Realizing a billion aspirations. Allen Lane: Penguins. Google Scholar
- Patterson, A.W. (2009) Secretary Napolitano discusses border security and passenger name record data sharing with Gop officials. Wikileaks public library of US diplomacy 09ISLAMABAD1642_a. US Post, Pakistan Islamabad. Available from: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09ISLAMABAD1642_a.html [Accessed: 13 April 2022] Google Scholar
- Ramanathan, U. (2010) A unique identity bill. Economic and Political Weekly, 45(30), 10–14. Google Scholar
- Ramnath, N.S. & Assisi, C. (2018) The Aadhaar effect: why the world’s largest identity project matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, India & Founding Fuel. Google Scholar
- Rao, U. & Nair, V. (2019) Aadhaar: governing with biometrics. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 42(3), 469–481. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2019.1595343 Web of Science®Google Scholar
- Schneier, B. (2015) Data and goliath: the hidden battles to collect your data and control your world, First edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Google Scholar
- Sharma, R.S. (2020) The making of Aadhaar. World’s largest identity platform. New Delhi: Rupa Publications. Google Scholar
- Solove, D.J. (2004) The digital person: technology and privacy in the information age, 2006th edition. New York: New York University Press. Web of Science®Google Scholar
- Thomas, M. (2018) The sham ID, called ‘Aadhaar’: hoax of the century, 1st edition. Notion Press. Google Scholar
- Zuboff, S. (2019) The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power, 1st edition. New York: Public Affairs. Google Scholar
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Nicolas Belorgey (16 janvier 2025). The Aadhaar battle: Why some players in the corporate world needed a biometric ID? Sociologie politique de l'économie. Consulté le 9 février 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/12prf