The Unique Identity (UID) Project, Biomterics and Re-Imagining Governance in India

At various points in its career, the Indian state has deployed technologies to govern the nation. Recently the state has undertaken a number of large scale projects to install digital technology. The most controversial of these is the Unique Identity Project, which is registering the biometric, along with demographic, information of the residents. In this paper, I will try to understand what is politically at stake in this technological intervention. I would like to explore the political logics of biometric system and its consequences. I will argue that UID re-imagines the economy and the state-citizen relationship as a series of transactions. Theoretically, the main thrust of this paper is to understand the “general economy of power”, as Michel Foucault calls it, which is unfolding in India around the issues of capitalist growth, inequality, social protection, and terrorism — and UID explores the technological possibility of the great convergence of these concerns