‘Without an Aadhaar card nothing could be done’: a mixed methods study of biometric identification and birth registration for children in Varanasi, India

ABSTRACT

Research on the global growth of digital identification programs has been largely silent on the implications for children and on birth registration. We conducted a mixed methods study with children, caregivers, and service providers in the Indian city of Varanasi to examine access to, and perceptions of, birth registration and Aadhaar. Findings show enrollment in Aadhaar far exceeds birth registration for both children and their caregivers, and that many respondents believe that Aadhaar enrollment is mandatory, and equates to securing proof of citizenship. Respondents described similar challenges with birth registration and Aadhaar, including that both can be falsified to support child labor and child trafficking. We suggest that promoting Aadhaar enrollment over birth registration undermines the critical role of birth registration in providing the state with comprehensive and actionable public health data. Links between birth registration and Aadhaar should be strengthened and their role in advancing child protection more closely examined.

KEY WORDS:

• Aadhaar
• birth registration
• CRVS
• child protection
• child rights
• biometric

Acknowledgements

This study would also not have been possible without the community members, children and service providers who offered their time and participation. We would like to thank the staff and leadership team at Aangan and at Pratichi for their support and leadership throughout the study, especially during data collection, and for their comments on the interview guides. We thank the data collection team, and the research team who completed the translation and transcription of interviews. Thank you to Ayesha Mehrotra for her help with qualitative coding and to Miriam Chernoff for her help with the statistical analysis. Finally, we would like to thank the reviewers and editors for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Amiya Bhatia is a Research Fellow in the Department of Global Health and Development in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Amiya’s research examines population health inequalities, violence against children, and child protection in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with a focus on South Asia. Her work also examines which places and populations are missing from government health statistics – including birth registration – in LMICs, and the implications of this invisibility on policy and practice. Amiya has worked for non-profits and international organizations on pediatric HIV programs, child immunization, polio, violence, child labor and marriage. Amiya holds an ScD and MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.

Elizabeth Donger is a researcher and advocate focusing on issues of child protection, distress migration and climate change. Before starting her JD at the NYU School of Law in 2019, she worked at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, where she conducted advocacy focused studies on adolescent refugees living in cities in Ecuador and Zambia, and on community-level preventative approaches to child protection in India. She has worked for non-profits in Colombia, Jordan, the US and the UK on issues of land restitution, forced displacement, women's rights and climate justice. She holds a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, where she was a John F. Kennedy Fellow. At NYU Law she works at the Climate Litigation Accelerator supporting legal cases in national courts and the Inter-American human rights system that use rights based arguments to address climate change.

Jacqueline Bhabha is a Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is also the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is the Director of Research at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard’s only university wide Human Rights research center. From 1997 to 2001 Bhabha founded and directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. Prior to 1997, she was a practicing human rights lawyer in London and at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. She has published extensively on issues of transnational child migration, refugee protection, children’s rights and citizenship. She is the author of Child Migration & Human Rights in a Global Age (Princeton University Press, 2014), and the editor of Children Without A State (MIT Press, 2011), Human Rights and Adolescence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), and co-editor of Realizing Roma Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), A Better Future: The Role of Higher Education for Displaced and Marginalised People (Cambridge U Press, 2020), and Time For Reparations (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2021). Her current research focuses on adolescents at risk of violence, social exclusion or discrimination. She is actively engaged in several research projects in India, examining the factors that drive access of low caste girls from illiterate families to higher education, and that transform gender norms among children and adolescents. She also works on similar issues within the Roma community in Europe. Bhabha serves on the board of the Scholars at Risk Network, the World Peace Foundation, the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by Harvard Global Institute, Tata Trusts, the Harvard Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute and EMpower.