Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Prasenjit Duara, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

ABSTRACT

In February 2009, the Government of India announced the formation of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). The purpose of this initiative was twofold: it would issue a unique identification (or Aadhaar) number to all Indian residents (as against citizens, an important distinction) that would be (a) robust enough to eliminate duplicate and fake identities, and (b) verifiable and authenticable in an easy, cost-effective way.

The project was controversial from the outset partly for substantive reasons – such as concerns about privacy and government snooping of databases – and partly for legal-procedural reasons, such as whether public services could make Aadhaar mandatory (India’s Supreme Court has recently ruled that they cannot) and for its excessive cost (one estimate was as high as $30 billion). On the other hand, the project has also had wide support, especially among some publics, within the State itself and from the private sector, for its avowed ability to identify and set up direct and unmediated links with the ultimate beneficiaries of social welfare initiatives.

Viewed in a longer historical perspective, Aadhaar itself emerges as only the latest in a long line of initiatives where technology has mediated between the Indian state and its publics. These histories include biopolitical interventions going back two centuries, from the census to fingerprinting to smallpox eradication to population control. Like the Chinese state, India is increasingly concerned about the social risks they see emanating from digital space and new media technologies and seeks new ways to control these technology providers. Citizenship emerges as a highly contested category in this history, both enabled and attenuated, even as the meanings of technology have shifted radically from the days when large dams, nuclear power plants, and other prominent symbols of conspicuous megatechnology were used by the state to define desired national futures.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Itty Abraham is Associate Professor at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, NUS, and an associate of the STS Cluster at ARI. His interests include Asian science and technology, especially nuclear politics, theories of the postcolonial, and international relations. His new book, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics, will be published by Stanford University Press in August 2014.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture & Society, Bangalore, India. His books include The Last Cultural Mile: An Inquiry into Technology and Governance in India (2011) and Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009). He recently conducted a three year field investigation into India’s Aadhaar project, the results of which have been published online – In the Wake of Aadhaar: The Digital Ecosystem of Governance in India, 2013.

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