SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2022

In this project, I have examined the impact of arbitrating welfare distribution systems to a biometric ID authentication system. I study the case of Aadhaar in India, a 12-digit nationwide universal ID that has been ‘seeded’ to over 300 government schemes and services in India. I focus particularly on the impact on food security of linking Aadhaar to the PDS, India’s nationwide infrastructure that distributes heavily subsidized foodgrains to families living below the poverty line. I critically analyze discourses that have been made by relevant stakeholders with diverse interests in the project- its designers and regulating authority, politicians, legal petitioners and civil advocacy groups. I juxtapose this public discourse that has been generated about Aadhaar with Aadhaar as a lived reality for India’s most marginalized people, exploring how Aadhaar has affected their access to crucial foodgrain subsidies. I examine how people have been excluded from crucial subsidy programs due to errors in biometric authentication and enrollment. I particularly focus on the issue of hunger deaths due to such exclusions, and examine these exclusions through the perspective of Joseph Pugliese’s ‘infrastructural normativities,’ and hunger deaths through Achille Mbembe’s ‘necropolitics’. I establish the new political subjectivities that are borne as a result of biometric systems, and how these subjectivities follow through a longer legacy of neoliberal, securitizing welfare reforms that have shaped India’s welfare spending over the past few decades.