'Surveillance in the Name of Governance: Aadhaar as a Fix for Leaking Systems in India' by Kathryn Henne in Blayne Haggart, Kathryn Henne and Natasha Tusikov (eds)
Information, Technology and Control in a Changing World (Palgrave, 2019) 223-245 comments
Many jurisdictions are employing biometric technologies to collect data about and verify the identities of social assistance recipients, with fraud prevention and cost savings serving as common justifications for doing so. This chapter explores the practices of building the infrastructure to monitor welfare beneficiaries, many of whom are vulnerable or marginalised populations. To do so, the chapter examines the Aadhaar system in India, which has issued over one billion unique identification numbers since being launched in 2010. The analysis illustrates a one-way expectation of knowledge and transparency (i.e., for citizens to disclose in order to access services), drawing attention to how nationalist agendas and forms of inequality inform who is subject to the state’s terms and conditions. In doing so, it considers how these forms of surveillance evince broader shifts in which state and non-state actors rely on knowledge to regulate subjects.
Henne notes
As other chapters in this book attest, knowledge is often central to the mobilisation of structural power. In focusing on knowledge, it is important to consider what and who can exercise such power and how. Structural power, according to Susan Strange (1998), sits with actors who can influence and exert control over people’s livelihoods and security, including the modes of accessing essential services. Here, I examine how two key features of structural power—that is, knowledge and authority—coalesce in the context of social assistance provision. State-supported welfare systems hinge on the collection of significant amounts of personal information, using data to monitor beneficiaries’ behaviour and to assess their compliance with the conditions of receiving assistance (Eubanks 2018). Accordingly, they rely on a wide range of technologies and techniques to manage and administer benefits and payments. In short, it depends on surveillance — that is, “the focused, systematic, and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction” (Lyon 2007, 14). Social assistance offers a domain of governance where we can observe, document, and trace both striking and mundane aspects of leveraging knowledge in the exercise of structural power. In this context, governance relies on knowledge about subjects, but it is not complete knowledge of their lived conditions; rather, governance here relies on isolated forms of data that can be extracted through biometric technologies. As this chapter illustrates, surveillance becomes a key mode through which authorities come to know subjects, shaping how they are treated.
While the targeted surveillance of marginalised populations is not new (see Gilliom 2001), the proliferation of monitoring techniques and verification mechanisms in the context of welfare provision has received greater attention in recent years. A number of countries have expanded—and are continuing to expand—their practices of tracking and authenticating social assistance recipients, using a range of technologies to do so. For example, in the United States, mechanisms for discerning welfare recipients’ bought goods, tracking their employment opportunities, and sharing data across administrative agencies are commonplace, as are risk-analysis and predictive tools for assessing their current and future circumstances. The Australian government has proposed expanding trials for welfare card programmes to limit individual purchases and has sought to mandate drug testing as a condition of social assistance. South Africa has added biometric authentication to its social benefits cards, 19 million of which have been supplied to welfare recipients since 2012, with a range of countries — including Ireland, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Philippines — following suit. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), established in 2010, has issued over one billion unique identifier numbers (or “Aadhaar”) for use across several government assistance programmes. Although distinct jurisdictions, authorities evoke similar justifications, such as fraud prevention and cost savings, for introducing new monitoring and authentication technologies in the context of social assistance. In doing so, the disproportionate surveillance of citizens who are often poor, vulnerable, and sometimes multiply marginalised becomes enabled through narratives of transparency, accountability, and good governance.
Developments in social assistance, I argue, demonstrate Zeynep Tufekci’s claim that the engineering of social life is “a political process involving questions of power, transparency, and surveillance” (2014, 1). To illustrate how socio-technical entanglements emerge in the form of surveillance and convey structural power, this chapter focuses on the making and maintenance of data-intensive infrastructure to support state social assistance systems, using India as its central case. Its analysis of Aadhaar examines how surveillance enabled through unique identification numbers constitutes a distinct mode of governance, one that depends on the pursuit of particular kinds of knowledge. After doing so, I consider how these practices evince broader shifts in which state actors, as well as non-state actors working in the service of state interests, create and sustain the conditions for regulating subjects.
Although its focus is on India, the chapter illuminates potential issues with and limitations of these hybridised formations of governance more generally. Hybridity, at least in relation to law and regulation, typically refers to “synergies between binding and non-binding mechanisms” that support governance functions (Trubek and Trubek 2005, 344). In this case, UIDAI is part of an amalgamated machinery that is supposed to streamline service delivery through data collection and verification; however, as elaborated upon in later sections of this chapter, India’s biometric management system has had notable failings. As a networked assemblage, it has the capacity to short-circuit. I use “assemblage” here to flag that although Aadhaar can be thought of as infrastructure, it is actually constituted as a “multiplicity of heterogeneous objects, whose unity comes solely from the fact that these items function together, that they work together as a functional entity” (Patton 1994, 158). Assemblages can materialise through events, but they are not fixed or stable; they can fluctuate along different registers that cross time and space. Thus, in addition to concerns of technocratic utility, the scrutiny of Aadhaar offers a space in which we can glean insight into how nationalist agendas and inequalities inform the terms and conditions of biometric surveillance systems and how they materialise in citizens’ lives in differential ways.
In particular, this chapter discusses how UIDAI’s one-way expectation of transparency, which is aimed at recipients of social assistance, illustrates how knowledge and authority coalesce in the contemporary expression of structural power. It shares Strange’s appreciation of granular analyses, as Germain elaborated earlier in this book, as a necessary mode of interrogating the details of a concern in order to understand its material effects. Here, I consider some of the intricacies through which power is being fashioned while retaining critical focus on the “big picture” as Strange would. However, and distinct from Strange, I do so in a way that accounts for entanglements of technologies, bodies, and social categories of difference, which are reflective of interlocking systems of inequality and oppression that are part of the Indian state. The argument put forth here departs from traditional Strangean analyses found in International Political Economy. Unlike Strangean analyses’ tendency to overlook questions of gendered inequality, I embrace feminist calls to look at how “surveillance is integral to many of our foundational structural systems, ones that breed disenfranchisement, and that continue to be institutionalized” and to critically attend to how “underlying structures of domination” inform surveillance activities (Dubrofsky and Magnet 2015, 7). This chapter therefore attends to a wider range of structural formations of difference, including race and racism as well as gender and sexuality, as it examines the exercise of state power.
The remainder of the chapter proceeds in four parts. The first section discusses the longer trajectory of states using knowledge about its residents as a central method of governing populations within its jurisdiction. A reflection on specific contours and features of India’s national identification initiative follows. The next section considers the specifics of Aadhaar in relation to insights gleaned through the literatures on surveillance, transparency, and governance, explaining specific contributions from the Indian example. I conclude by contemplating this case study’s implications for how we think of knowledge, particularly its role in the growing range of practices that can be understood as biogovernance, which generally speaking, is the governance of populations and individual humans through science and technology.
