There has been considerable debate on the politics of the Unique Identification. It is claimed that the ID card will not be a citizenship card, and the government expert committee has just released a document with the standards for identification. It would be good if we could have some people who could interpret this data for us and what it means for people concerned with the long term impact of the UID
Draft Person ID Codification
http://egovstandards.gov.in/public-review/egscontent.2008-09-04.3708808455/at_download/file
Generic Data Elements-
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Lawrence a quick question, did you mean data or data elements listed? there is no data here…. the data elements are as non precise as can be with regard to such endeavors. so….
i only quickly glanced at it….. it is a bunch of uninformative tables….. how can any one interpret a schema of sorts without any preamble? hyperlinked websources for the elements explains the logic for choosing it? really this would upset me if my teenaged niece came up with such a document for a name or identification project of plants/insects/stars/rocks.
the list of core group singularly lacked any names other than data managers – no sociologist/anthropologist… will read it in detail again and hope others by then have found it more meaningful and interpretable.
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Hi Anuradha
Thanks for this. I posted this precisely because of its baffling opacity and was hoping that maybe other could make sense of it
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These documents are about data standardization and allocation of ownership – i.e. which agency collects and updates what information and so on. The only thing we can take a critical look at is this: is there anything in the list of data elements that is out of the ordinary ? I will look at it more closely later, but on the face of it, it seems to me that there is nothing unusual here – this kind of data regarding individuals is already there in various government records. What this seems to be all about is to standardize it such that the data can freely circulate from one agency to another. In other words, this is stuff the state already knows about citizens – it is just that its knowledge is so scattered that it is difficult to pull it all together. The process that is being intiated is to make it easier for the government to consolidate its knowledge of each individual.
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Just wanted to add to my previous comment that the most troubling feature of these documents is that there is scant mention of data sharing protocols in them.
As matters stand, any information gathered by any agency about anyone in the context of any specific transaction can be fed into the central data system. Worse, without any specification of the relationships between the various agencies and this central data system, any data that the central system acquires can in principle be shared with any agency.
Apart from the obvious issues of privacy, given the real possibility of illegitimate exchanges between e governance and e commerce in India – this should have been an important part of the expert committee’s mandate.
The expertise that is required at this stage is actually one in privacy laws. Something at the back of my mind is saying — may be it is time for filing a citizen caveat!
What a dramatic shift in public agendas ! From enforcing transparency and accountability in government agencies to protecting the privacy of the individual citizen.
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Hi Anuradha,
This data table is what will get filled up. it maybe be worthwhile to look deep into this tabulation and see what kind of knowledge will be produced through these data tables. Lakhs of data collectors will be crawling over all kind of places to collect data that will fill up these tables. The filled data will be more opaque. If we understand it know maybe State’s processes will a bit more legible.
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Anant, Jeebesh,
Yes, I understand that it is about metadata.
But an introductory document has to inform about the metadata, right? What is it? why is it there? what are its relationships to each other? Since they have presented this in a tabular form, I am imagining that all relationships derives from the person’s name in the top of the ontology.
The part that is frustrating rather ridiculous is the definitions section. The section that I am really interested in.
When we transfer human readadble/processed information to machine reading, the definitions take the maximum input from the spectrum of understanding of the concept. For the computer that becomes a fixed, unchangeable string, and anything that is slightly out of that definition, which the human mind will interpret differently, the machine will not.
So digitalizing concepts of marriage, parent, child, address etc requires that we have very accepted definitions and ready consensus is available for each concept. Such a definition is fed to the ontology and the slot should read the entire range and complexity of the concept.
Hence I expected that there would documentation of the consensus achieved for the definitions of these metadata elements. Instead i get html’s to wordnet, dictionary etc…..please check out link for defining ‘occupation’. I am not sure whether to be amused or sad.
Anant, I can see you are anticipating positively for standardization so that interoperability with other information systems happens, yes that is the plus…. but we are standardizing to machine that only take one standard about human life…. i would rather stand arguing with a clerk that I am in a ‘live in’ relationship, or my nephew is not my adopted child but he lives with me and he is my ward, or all the other very human real life situations with addresses…..which the clerk will probably understand than face a computer slot that will reject anything that appears different to it.
There is a certain fixity to social concepts once it is computerized and this document presents them like we have all agreed to them. Have we? If so where is consensus documented in this context -it would be good to know.
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Anu,
No I am not anticipating positively for standardization and interoperability of data. I am saying that standardization and interoperability is what they have set out to achieve. The scope of the document clearly states clearly what they are trying to doThey can achieve it without a consensus on definitions. And we dont have the leverage to stop them in their tracks on that consensus front. The unique id may contain a whole lot of representational data about the individual that the individual may not agree with. As a matter of fact the published Id may not contain most of the data that is being gathered but it will be gathered and manipulated and shared anyways.
Even if you have standardized, consensus based definitions, the information can vary contextually. For example, you may tell the clerk that you have a live-in relationship which is not the same as marriage. But if you are looking for housing in Delhi and the landlord assumes that you are married, you may not want to go and challenge that false assumption.
The UID as it is being conceived does not concern itself with all this. Which is precisely why the moot questions for me is what data needs to be known by whom and at which point of time and place and how it will be used by whom.
They have not set out to achieve a consensus on what constitutes marriage or family or any of the other data bits. They are not equipped to do that. Each government department in India has a different interpretation of those sorts of information. (I remember a very intelligently argued essay by AR Desai on this issue – written sometime in the 70s I think.) That polyvalence and flexibility can be seen as the strength or the weakness of the Indian administration and judiciary – depending on your position and how it affects you.
I can empathize with your stance. But to me the more urgent and practical problem is the issue of rules about sharing data. The thing about this system is that at the end of your interview with the clerk – to use your example – if you convince the clerk that the information that you have given him does not fit the slots that the computer is giving him, he will push the button for the string which says value cannot be determined. And that string will then attach to your name and start circulating through all sorts of places where you may not want it to circulate.
In short, my attitude towards this is as follows: there are some battles which are great. There are some battles which are on your hands. If I have to choose my battles, I will go for the one that will give me some more elbow room. I think the battle about what in life can be digitzed and what cannot be /should not be digitized is a great one. But I can also see it drawing me into other battles where I have even less elbow room. For example, if you want a consensus on what constitutes marriage, then we have to start talking about uniform civil code. By the time we are done with it, I will find myself compromised on a hundred other grounds. I would rather ask right away, who wants to know whether or not I am married. Well, anyways, that is how I see it at this point of time. Regardless of the consensus on what constitutes marriage, if the government is going to give me a childcare allowance if I am a married parent, I might say yes. But if some random multilevel marketer is going to bombard me with marketing ploys depending on my marital status, i dont want that agency to know whether or not I am married. As of now, the system is being designed as if government and non government agencies (and with the entry of private actors into social welfare a lot of corporations also have access to a lot of stuff) – can all happily share all information. It is only a matter of making sure that the data is in a format that will be readable across all platforms.
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Anant, the example was to highlight only, My main point is that i dont want to be excluded of vitals of citizenship nor do i want to be normalized to nearest accepted value in the metadata -without my consent. Especially when neither the objectives were made clear nor do i have a clue as to what it gains for me that i don’t already have. This at the individual level. As people, castes/tribes etc i don’t want to get into that now. But I have serious concerns. Privacy is an issue for one of my multiple identities -the somewhat aware person. I understand that it is a huge issue for stalling of UId in the west, reams and reams of opposition on this exists -but my other identities and people are little less concerned with this than basic exclusion possibilities of getting ration card etc.
It is not the technology that bothers me with its limitations so much, it is the freaking secrecy is what i am irritated with -almost like you don’t need to know. this is for your good. maybe it is but try explaining it to me, this is about me.
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Quoting Anant >>They have not set out to achieve a consensus on what constitutes marriage or family or any of the other data bits. They are not equipped to do that. Each government department in India has a different interpretation of those sorts of information. (I remember a very intelligently argued essay by AR Desai on this issue – written sometime in the 70s I think.) That polyvalence and flexibility can be seen as the strength or the weakness of the Indian administration and judiciary – depending on your position and how it affects you.
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This polyvalency and flexibility is now going to be lost as it gets ‘fixed’ in one single interpretation in the database. And we don’t know which particular interpretation they have used. I would like to see that, not at all asking them to go about getting fresh consensus….
I/we want to be aware that when information transfers and hands itself into another technology -what is going to be lost is as important as what is going to be gained.
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Anu,
There are a couple of things here that I need to clarify. First – I dont quite believe that digitization necessarily and directly results in reifiying any one meaning of a social relationship as the only meaning. At the end of the day, information has to be fed into the computer and retrieved from it by people. A more plausible consequence of digitization is that it is going to alter the ways in which meanings are assigned and constructed. That to me means that the terrain of political action – the terrain of plausible action changes. The goal posts shift. I see my own role as one of trying to chart out the changing terrain and recognize the new goal posts so that new action repertoirs can be imagined. (I have recently written a piece to lay out this outlook here: http://www.thefishpond.in )
Secrecy -yes. But over the years I have become less and less sympathetic to the idea that badgering institutions for more information is the best way to go ahead. Reformists (I use that word without much value investment) in India have consistently followed an incremental strategy. That is, they have a sense of where they want to go but they dont quite know the path. They make a move, see how people respond to it, back off, rewrite agendas, make a thrust somewhere else with the benefit of the new knowledge, and then repeat the iteration. What this means is that at any given point there is NO fixed road map – no plan that can be shared and debated. It is a sort of entreprenurial approach to reform and restructuring. Demanding transparency and openness from entreprenurial actors can only result in frustration and anger.
That is the second point I wanted to clarify: I strongly feel that new approaches and styles of action are necessary.
Now specifically about who gets excluded from the ration card and so on – surely some will be excluded. But who exactly gets excluded and how is something that cannot be read off these tables or from the meanings of the data elements. It can only be sensed by actually following how the technology works and how it will be used and who gets to become the mediators in the negotiations between the centers of calculation and data handling and the people who want to be counted (or not counted).
I also feel that the expert committee at this point has no clue which particular interpretation they are going to use. The committee could not care less. If I want to know which interpretation will become the salient one, I would have to see which government agency is going to become the owner of the data directory – and become responsible for generating and updating that data element. From that point on, I would have to look at what are the chains through which data will pass before it becomes an entry in the computer. I would then have to follow how that entry in the system will be interpreted by different agencies and actors. It will also depend on who contests that particular agency which is owner of the data directory. All this sounds very cumbersome – but that is only because we are trying to talk about something that people will intuitively know.
On privacy and how that is relevant or not relevant – I am not really persuaded that somehow privacy is a western middleclass liberal preoccupation and therefore necessarily less relevant to people in India. If we walk into any urban slum and spend some time figuring out how people relate to government agencies we will begin to notice that people are very tactical about when to be counted and when not to be counted.
At a time when there is an unprecedented push by governments and corporations in India to tap into the consumption of the poor in order to maintain growth rates and profit lines – I think it is absolutely important that we begin to conceive of some sort of mechanisms that will regulate how information is gathered, shared, used and circulated by different agencies. What the expert committee is working on is to remove the inbuilt technological/institutional blocks to those circulations. I am saying that given that context – privacy laws are the most handy tool to reconstruct some regulation – to engage the committee on its own ground -rather than on some normative ground where we think they should be operating.
There may be other instruments, there may even be other grounds for intervention. I am open to them.
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Anant thanks for the detailed response.
Though it is for Lawrence to interpret, as he brought attention to the document for discussion. To me, your stand reads more like inevitability of accepting these instruments. I almost feel like I am in a military state, which maybe it is in a way, but to even take away the possibility of tearing apart a shoddy, sloppy piece of work, that was done by a bunch of elected representatives, is amazing testimony to what we call ‘democracy’. But then NN did not even need to be elected!!!!
A discussion for me means to go the core of it and see where it holds or does not. I do not function in an accepting mode of whatever is handed to me, without as much as peering into it. That does not make me an aspiring reformer -I am curious.
May i say that exclusion is one of the most powerful side effects of standardization -not out of some fuzzy thinking but from personal experience of being a developer of similar naming, digitizing and ontology building activities to manage large scale scientific data. The technology effect will be the same for people or science. Defining objects from the historical accumulation of knowledge of a concept, at the same time treading the path of anticipating unknown possible fallout and repercussions, wherein the definitions should still hold under changing circumstances, itself lending to constant refining are vital and the most time consuming-bitter-acrimonious efforts in such an exercise.
Privacy is important, food is more important, they are connected. I need proof that food will be on the table/floor and then check the door for an installed camera. No food, i have no energy to fight intrusion -which is offensive/obstructive -starving or not. So I end up handing the fight to one’s who have eaten…. standardization for better distribution or reenforcing existing and maybe worsening power structures for the poor?
There is a lot of material gathered on privacy to help jump start this argument – i was not negating the west’s efforts in this direction -they’ve done that because they have no fear of food, kerosene, clothes and roof being threatened by their UID proposal’s.
Hence I can use that experience quite easily to build my case -very valuable and requires less of my energy in that direction.
I was going to move to the part where we can constructively begin looking at each data element…..
like looking at the three slots for gender: male, female, transgender.
And examine how the permanence of filling one slot effects somebody. But i am feeling a little dissipated with this turn of the discussion, and i hope someone else picks it up.
Let me just add, i want us to have a system that works better at distribution, no doubt about that. I also want to keep my eyes open to this process shutting out people who are already at the edges of the development process. And what it does it do me individually is no trivial matter either.
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Anu,
I am sorry if I sounded fatalist or as if I am refusing to allow discussion in the direction you wanted to take it. Far from it.
Perhaps it is just that I have lived in strange places where poor people have committed suicides because the electricity board intruded too aggressively into their kitchens, or people have gone starving because some local NGO managed to scrutinize and document the fact that there is a TV set in the house.
To me being able to choose what to reveal or conceal about oneself is quite central to one’s ability to secure food. Perhaps in other places people can first secure kerosene and then think about having some control over how information about their accumulated debt is traveling. I dont deny that possibility just because i have not seen it. And I didnt mean to quarrel over what is the single most useful thing to do with the draft.
Peace.
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Peace. :)
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Even for a reader not well aquainted with technical jargon the document will appear as a construct in deeply rooted class bias.
For eg. the document envisages unique codes for every occupation. So legilsators and senior officials will be known by the code 01, Corporate Manager (02), General Manager (04), Office clerks (12) and likewise. Then you see that there are unique codes for suffixes or the titles bestowed by the state – Bharat Ratna, Padam Vibhushan, IAS and IFS. What could be the need for including census/ersonal data relating to your status in society as a data element in the UID Card? Does not this create a potential for discrimination?
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In the digitisation of land records in Karnataka the plurality of claims that accrued around land was slowly being done away with. This process has been brilliantly analyzed by Solomon Benjamin. Now with this gigantic project of recording all human inside India will surely do away with many forms of social plurality that evolves and get entangled over time. The excel sheet of state will be impatient.
The larger question that could be posed here would be the relation between plural forms of lives and self and it’s relation with State. With languages we can see that the process of division between dialect and language has made many languages disappear or inferiorised. Someone like Habib Tanvir would go around arguing that best poets (kabir, tulsidas, mira etc) of this sub continent spoke and sung in dialects and decided to practice theatre with the languages that actors came with. But states in it’s obsession of uniformity and legibility has proceeded in it’s own way.
Identification of persons, digitisation of property titles, land records etc are something that we will all have to live with, till climate change completely alter all relation of power and production :). But, at the present moment how do we think this would be challenging.
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Ravi Shukla’s article in the latest EPW on the UID – titled Reimagining Citizenship (open access for four weeks) offers some explanation of the technical issues regarding biometrics. It also makes an important point that the UID may imply a relatively exclusive notion of consumer citizenship as opposed to the political citizenship. It suggests that this may complicate the taken for granted opposition between the state (vertical hierarchies) and the market (horizontal/flat networks) by producing a node that can facilitate new types of relationships.
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