Aadhaar and data privacy: biometric identification and anxieties of recognition in India.

The data privacy debate in India has evolved with respect to the government's biometric identity programme, Aadhaar that enrols welfare-dependent, poor populations to grant them access to government benefits. While legal challenges to Aadhaar by civil society groups argued that the biometric identity infrastructure creates conditions of mass surveillance and violation of individual privacy, the Indian Supreme Court in 2018 ruled that the government was justified in restricting individual privacy for the collective good of providing welfare in a transparent and corruption-free manner. Given the disproportionate burden on these populations to prove their identities to the state, this paper draws on a close reading of legal and policy texts, and activist documentation to argue that there is a need to move beyond the narrative of mass surveillance as privacy violation. Data privacy interests of the welfare-dependent emerge in the moment of biometric authentication, which creates anxieties of recognition when their authentication attempts fail or are deliberately falsified. Often, to have better social mobility, they are compelled to be physically mobile in order to enrol or update their records under conditions of physical disability and meagre socioeconomic means. These anxieties illuminate their privacy interests through a compromise of dignity or dignified living, a formulation articulated in the 2018 Aadhaar verdict. The paper makes a critical contribution to the global conversation on data privacy through a discussion of the Indian case that demonstrates the privacy-recognition nexus in local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]