Technologies of Disintermediation in a Mediated State: Civil Society Organisations and India's Aadhaar Project.

The various lines of resistance against the Indian government's Unique Identification Number project since its inception in 2009 form a national and publicly accessible narrative. But less is known about Aadhaar's reception among civil society actors, non-profits who partnered with the state to implement this scheme among their constituencies. Drawing upon eighteen months of fieldwork in Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Delhi, this paper traces the nature of state and civil society engagement with Aadhaar. It demonstrates how this e-governance initiative encountered the politics and agendas of intermediary organisations long engaged in providing identity documents to the poor in the absence of state recognition of certain groups. The state sought a condition of disintermediation via biometric technology and collaborated with non-state actors to aid implementation. The failed encounter with a few non-profits working with the migrant poor demonstrates that a technocratic notion of identity and citizenship clashed with the materiality of local practices serving to maintain existing intermediations and resulting in exclusions from the Aadhaar scheme for certain groups. The paper argues that this encounter demonstrates the durability of the mediated state at a time when new technologies are deployed to remove intermediations, with consequences for the most marginalised populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]