Contested Surveillance: Aadhaar as a Trust Infrastructure

Aadhaar is the national biometric identity project undertaken by India in 2009. The goal is to provide a 12 digit unique identification number to the 1.32 billion people in the country, but since its conception the Aadhaar has been at the center of fierce debate. To some, it is a project of identification and brings fears of privacy violations and surveillance. To others, it is a project of registration, representing modernity, technical progress and the right to be seen by the state. This thesis tries to answer to grapple with the question of whether the Aadhaar is about identity, identification or registration — and why this answer differs for different interest groups.
Existing literature about the Aadhaar centers around technical failures of the system, but this thesis constructs a more theoretical critique of the system to get to the answer. By using the framework of a ‘Trust Infrastructure’ that manages trust between different parties, this thesis makes the case that both surveillance and transparency are low trust, high control situations. What distinguishes them is two factors: the directionality in which the sight is directed, and the proportional power between the observer and the observed. By problematising the context around the Aadhaar and the dominant narratives presented by the government, this thesis finds that the Aadhaar currently facilitates identification by the government towards citizens, but does not provide the necessary mechanisms for citizens to hold the government accountable for the rights conferred by registration. And the same Aadhaar is called a transparency tool by its builders and a surveillance tool by critics because the story of this power differential between citizens and the government is contested by differing narratives of who is responsible for the corruption in public systems.