ABSTRACT
The Indian governance and security architecture is increasingly relying on technological and digital innovation. The most ambitious scheme of the government is the attempt to identify biometrically the entire Indian population. In recent years, biometric identification technologies have emerged as one of the most important forms of risk-based security management globally. The development of ID technologies is rapidly gaining significance in Asian countries (e.g. ID cards in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Japan) (Lyon 2007a; Dass and Pal 2009; Whitley and Hosein 2010). The Indian project is unique in its kind as it attempts to enroll 1.2 billion people in an immensely geographically and socially diverse country. Due to the large size of the Indian population, it is undoubtedly one of the largest governance-related exercises in the world (UIDAI 2010b). The collection of biometric data for the building of a National Population Register (NPR) under the Home Ministry together with the Unique Identification Number (UID) system under the Planning Commission will result in the world's largest centralized biometric database. As the government goes digital, unique identification numbers are expected to enable an efficient networking of databases containing data on Indian residents. This development is happening at a rapid pace, as the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) aims to enroll 600 million individual Indian residents within the first four years of its inception.
