Becoming data: biometric IDs and the individual in ‘Digital India’

Abstract Aadhaar (literally ‘foundation’) is the largest national biometric identification drive the world has witnessed. An Aadhaar is a twelve‐digit ID number linked to its holder's iris scans, fingerprints, facial photograph, and demographic information in a centralized database. In but a decade, India has expeditiously enrolled over 90 per cent of its billion‐strong population into a Central Identities Data Repository. This essay is an ethnographic consideration of the processes by which Aadhaar enrollees become data, focusing on the sociopolitical valence of biometric data. It argues that the datafication of the body via Aadhaar occasions re‐examinations of – and contestations over – the idea of the individual in postcolonial India, a country often deemed sociocentric in popular and scholarly discourse alike. Further, it suggests that biometric socialization facilitates belonging in a ‘Digital India’, often rendered as a data cosmopolis in emergent technocratic imaginations.