Digital identity, datafication and social justice: understanding Aadhaar use among informal workers in south India

ABSTRACT

Aadhaar, India's national biometric digital identity program aims to provide 12-digit number for every Indian resident. Through this Aadhaar seeks to achieve digital financial inclusion of groups like marginalized informal workers. This paper focuses on experiences of informal worker groups – of cab-drivers and domestic workers in a south Indian city who use Aadhaar as an identity for verification on online recruitment portals and gig-economy apps. The paper contributes a novel theoretical lens to the literature on ‘data justice’ and more broadly to ICT4D research. It operationalizes the cultural, economic and political dimensions of ‘abnormal justice’ as being synergistic with surveillance and datafication inherent to digital identity. Using empirical evidence of semi-structured interviews and field observations, this paper present three critical findings: current use of digital identities reifies extant cultural inequalities experienced by marginalized workers; unprotected datafication exploits the new-found digital participation of the marginalized to create further economic inequalities; and unfair and complex barriers continue to exist for the marginalized using digital identity to voice ‘informed consent’ or to access redressals to security issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital identity
• datafication
• data justice
• biometrics
• surveillance

Acknowledgements

The author sincerely thanks all the participants, the editorial team and the reviewers. The author would also like to thank the School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London and particularly his supervisory team of Dr Yingqin Zheng and Dr Philip Wu for their support in developing this paper as part of PhD research.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Shyam Krishna is a doctoral candidate at the School of Business and Management, Royal Holloway, University of London. He researches on digital identity systems, gig-economy platforms and their overlap.

Notes

1 This has been limited after a recent Supreme Court ruling disallowing private sector use.

2 When this paper in the later parts refers to ‘interviewees’, this broadly means the informal workers interviewed, relating to a finding emerging across multiple interviews. Interviews of leaders and digital platform creators are specifically referenced where used.

3 In Hindi – Mera Aadhaar, mera pehchaan – the word ‘pehchaan’ has a technical meaning of identity with recognition as the broader meaning.

4 PAN - permanent account number. PAN card is required for drivers to register as partners with rider hailing apps.

5 Also known in many other countries as tuk-tuks.

6 Both from interviewees and from a report ‘State of Aadhaar’ from the Omidyar Network based on a large-scale survey for 2017–2018 – see Abraham et al. (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This paper in a working paper version was funded by The ‘Urban Data, Inequality and Justice in the Global South' case studies which form part of a Senior Research Fellowship under funding by the University of Manchester's Sustainable Consumption Institute with additional financial support from Canada's International Development Research Centre.