People as data, data as oil: the digital sovereignty of the Indian state

ABSTRACT

This article connects the Indian state’s regulation of the digital economy, exemplified by the 2019 draft of the e-commerce policy, to its regulation and control of bodies, specifically through the biometric ID, Aadhaar, and its proliferating uses. It argues that the thrust of India’s emergent project of digital sovereignty is not merely geopolitical, but also biopolitical, a process through which the Indian state is engaged in altering what it is to be sovereign and its subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital sovereignty
• biometric ID
• India
• data governance
• Aadhaar

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The discourse equating data to oil or coal does not attend to the environmental implications of the digital, gives no attention to the energy use by data centers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Revati Prasad

Revati Prasad is an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Leading Edge Fellow with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. She was previously a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Advanced Research in global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned a PhD in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2020.