[Reader-list] Surveillance and the MNIC Project

[Aman Sethi]

Dear All,

This is PART I of my term paper, "May I see your papers", on the Multi-Purpose National Identity Card(MNIC) Project.  The first phase of the project is underway in 13 border districts, and the idea and is issue a card for every indian. Its rather long, so i have posted it in two parts.

Cheers
Aman

Abstract:
The Indian administration has talked about a National Identification System (NIDS) for years.  But strangely enough, no one seems to know about it.  Press coverage has been erratic at best, and non-existent at worst.  But, the NIDS project raises crucial questions about how the Indian State engages with its citizens at present, and how it foresees a change in this relationship in the future.  The project raises important questions concerning privacy and the rights of an individual, weighed against the safety of state and society.  Through the course of this paper I shall examine the major arguments in favour of, and against, the NIDS project and shall examine the social and economic costs and benefits of its implementation.

Introduction: The un-Sangh Advocates
“The vagabond is by definition a suspect.”
Daniel Nordman (1987)
The earliest demands for a National Identification System (NIDS) were heard in 1992 when the Sangh Parivar and its allied organisations staged protests against the influx of Bangladeshi immigrants in the states of Assam, Bengal and the national capital – Delhi.  They argued that the migration of, primarily Muslim, Bangladeshis was altering the demographic profile of the country, and took every opportunity to air their xenophobic slogan –“Infiltrators, Quit India.”  In response to their protests, the Central Government launched Operation Pushback, with the expressed purpose of deporting Bangladeshi immigrants from Delhi.   At the time, one of the major practical problems faced by the government was the identification and enumeration of the immigrants. The only form of identification that the Indian poor have is the ration card, and this was deemed insufficient by the Narishimha Rao government of the day; the government stated that possession of these cards would not guarantee “automatic citizenship” .  In this context, a meeting of the chief ministers (of states on the eastern border) was called and a resolution was passed to issue identity cards to citizens in border districts.  However, the government failed to execute the proposal.
In 1998, when the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)   came to power with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as Prime Minster and L.K. Advani in charge of the Home Ministry, it had not forgotten its obsession with ‘aliens” and “anti-nationals’.  A Group of Ministers (GoM) report, commissioned on ‘Reforming the National Security System,’ observed:
“Illegal migration has assumed serious proportions.  There should be compulsory registration of citizens and non-citizens living in India.  This will facilitate preparation of a national register of citizens.  All citizens should be given a Multi-purpose National Identity Card (MNIC) and non-citizens should be issued identity cards of a different colour and design.  This should be introduced initially in the border districts or may be in a 20 Kms border belt and extended to the hinterland progressively.  The Central Government should meet the full cost of the identity card scheme.”    
The Obvious Solution
A card for every Indian 
The NDA government chose to act upon the recommendations of the GoM report, and the idea of a Multipurpose National Identity Card (MNIC) Project was put forward; Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was commissioned to carry out a feasibility study in early 2000.  The aim of the MNIC was, to quote Advani, “to help substantially in checking illegal immigration and infiltration and in tracing of criminals and subversives, especially in the border areas of the country. These cards will also be used for the purpose of issuing passports, driving licenses, ration cards, health care, admission in educational institutions, employment in public/private sector, life and general insurance as also for maintenance of land records and urban property holdings.”  The ministry envisaged a massive information superstructure that would maintain records on every Indian resident.  
But would it work?
By February 2001, TCS had given the go-ahead for the MNIC project.  Christened Project NISHAN (National Identification System Home Affairs Network) by TCS, the project was estimated to cost 4000 crores over the next 10 years, excluding the cost of establishment, management, fibre connectivity, and the cost of capital.   The project would also require completely new software, capable of handling detailed information on at least one billion data entries.
TCS suggested a three-tier network comprising of a client tier- that would provide the interface between the user and the network; a data-source tier that would access the central data warehouse; and a mid-tier that would provide an interface between the two.  Primary data would be collected at 15,000 collection points, which could be franchised out to private collectors. It further recommended a plastic identification (ID) card with two dimensional bar coding that would store a wealth of information about the card holder – personal details, biometric measurements like digital fingerprints or iris/ retinal scans and details of verified documents like passports, driver’s licenses and ration cards.   To ensure that the database stayed current, the initial phase of the project would have to be completed in 5 years. Subsequently the enrollment would be in accordance with the rate of growth of population of the respective regions.  TCS recommended a public-private partnership in the collection of data through a process of franchisees.  Eighty percent of the population could be covered by the private sector with the remaining 20 percent – in remote and sensitive areas- covered by government.  Pleased with the results of the feasibility study, the government launched a pilot project in 20 selected sub districts of 13 border-states and union territories  from April 2003 to December 2004.  


Methodology: Getting down to the nuts and bolts
Based on the information posted on the Ministry of Information Technology website , the methodology of the MNIC project shall be as follows.
Initially, on the basis of a census-type survey, a National Population Register (NPR) shall be created, with the allocation of a unique National Identification Number (NIN) to each citizen. A separate National Register of Residence (NRR) shall also be prepared that will keep track of all non-citizen residents. The NIN shall be assigned at birth to every Indian citizen with a system of continuous updating put in place at every tahsil to record births, death, change in address, marital status etc.  Each citizen shall be issued a Multi-purpose National Identity Card (MNIC) and each non-citizen shall be provided with a Multipurpose Residence Card.  The MNIC shall contain data regarding the personal details, heath records, education records, old-age pension, information concerning access to the public distribution system, disability related services, Scheduled Caste / Scheduled Tribe related services. The card will contain foolproof identity markers like a unique NIN, a photograph and a digital fingerprint.   All information on the card shall be printed in English and the state language.
 In a drastic revision of the TCS estimate, the budget allocation for the MNIC project is a whopping 10,000 crores over the next three to four years.  The budget includes the cost of creation and maintenance of the National Population Register, infrastructure and the cost of the card.  The government plans a public-private partnership business model to limit any possible liabilities for both parties.  The government has also made changes to the Citizenship Act of 1955 to make it compulsory for every citizen to submit to the NIDS. 

“The gold standard for all identification”: Hard-selling the MNIC
Bigger, Better, More
The state sees several advantages to the MNIC project.  The MNIC shall make other forms of identification like ration cards, driver licenses, birth certificates etc, superfluous.   The MNIC shall also make voter ID cards, issued by the Election Commission, unnecessary.  The card shall also solve the problem of false entries in electoral rolls, and impersonation of voters.  Supporters of the project claim that the card shall allow socio-economic benefits to be aimed at those who need them the most, thereby shall reducing leakages and corruption in the delivery mechanism of government assistance.  According to a slick presentation on the Ministry of Information Technology website, the card shall soon become the “gold standard database to form the core basis for all e-governance projects.”   The NIN shall be required for the operation of existing bank accounts, the opening of new bank accounts, the operation of insurance policies, the registration and transfer of property and the operation of Pensions and Employer Provident Fund.
The card shall have two variants – the India Basic Card, which shall be issued free of cost, and the India Premium Card, which shall be paid for by the user.  The India Basic Card shall contain all the data described in the preceding paragraphs; while the Premium Card shall have a larger memory chip, which shall allow online financial transactions and the card’s use as an ‘e-purse’ in addition to the existing functions of the basic card.

The spectre of terrorism
The September 11th strike on the World Trade Centre, in New York in 2001, served as a central lobbying point for those in favour of a NIDS.  According to a report by the Century Foundation, all 19 hijackers involved in the attack had valid social security numbers, and many had driver licenses and operational bank accounts.  On the September 9, 2001, two days before the attack, one of the group leaders was stopped by highway patrol for speeding on I-95 in Maryland, USA.  The trooper checked his license and registration papers, found that they were in order, and handed him a speeding ticket.  Supporters of the NIDS point out that had there been a system in place, which would warn the trooper that the driver was on a government watch list, tragedy may have been averted.  In India as well, the discourse on the MNIC is cloaked in the language of terrorism and security alongside the more soothing language of improving the delivery of government services.  The Bangladeshi immigrant –once portrayed as a free-loader on the country’s scarce resources and supposedly a major reason for the implementation of the NIDS- has now been transformed into an ‘infiltrator’ in official discourse- out to destroy the rubric of the state and the fabric of the nation.  In the USA, the proposed NIDS is supposed to build digital profiles of individuals to help enforcement agencies identify ‘potential terrorists.’  
The category of the potential terrorist is an interesting one.  A potential terrorist is a person who could at some undefined point in the future pose a security risk of some sort.  In a widely quoted remark made at a press conference on the state of intelligence in Iraq, US Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld said, “Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."     Clearly, the category of “potential terrorist” falls in the category of “unknown unknowns”.   The US government feels such people must be stopped, and that the only way to do that is to pre-emptively put them under surveillance and so, prevent them from realizing their full potential.  As they are ‘unknown’ by definition, the argument requires that everyone is a suspect and must constantly be watched for suspicious behaviour.

Why is industry so interested?
As I mentioned before, the government is not the only one enthusiastic about the introduction of a National Identity Card System (NIDS) in India.  Predictably, the software industry has found the prospect of a 10,000 crore project rather enticing.
According to a report on the Convergence Plus website, the “smart-card” industry in India is expected to churn out almost 21.7 million units by 2005 .  The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)  reports that the US government spent an estimated $115 billion on government research and development on anti-terror initiatives in 2003 alone.  While the report concedes that in many cases, the companies could simply be fighting for pre-existing government contracts, as opposed to proposing changes in government policy, it documents specific instances of private lobbying for surveillance initiatives.  One such example is Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison’s, proposition of a NIDS and his offer to provide the software for free.  What Larry Ellison did not mention were the prohibitive hidden costs of servicing and running the system. Apart from the obvious market of smart cards and the accompanying surveillance infrastructure, industry is extremely interested in the potential that such information holds.
In a diverse and differentiated market like India, industry needs extremely specific consumer information to ensure that products are aimed at the right audience.  Increasingly, marketing departments speak of the need to target high-profit niche markets.  For example, if a pharmaceutical company, launching a product in a particular city, can estimate the percentage population that has a certain income is concentrated around a particular locality in a city and is diabetic; it can launch a highly specific ad campaign aimed straight at this segment.  Additionally, if it can determine the kind of establishments this section of society is likely to patronize, it can further refine its campaign – perhaps by teaming up a popular restaurant and organizing a sugar-free dessert festival.  This strategy would be far more effective than putting up huge billboards all over the city, and hoping that knowledge of its product would eventually trickle down to potential customers. However, such specific information is extremely difficult and expensive to collect.  Fortunately for industry, the MNIC shall contain medical history, tax history and property records.  Further, functioning as an e-purse, it shall record and store every financial transaction made by the cardholder.  Under the structure imagined by the government, all transaction information shall be stored in a central database and, given industry’s role in setting up and operating the system, building consumer profiles shall be cheap, accurate and instantaneous.

State versus Citizen: The need for identification
The MNIC project brings the relationship between the state and the citizen into sharp focus.  The project of mapping the body of the citizenry makes use of the obvious assumption that the citizenry exists.  But what constitutes this citizenry? Who is a citizen? 
The citizen is constructed by the mode by which the state views the populace. The European Convention on Nationality  defines nationality (and consequently the category of the citizen) as a legal bond between a person and the state.  It further elaborates that this bond may be forged by three arterial ways – Jus Sanguinis, Jus Soli and Naturalisation.  
The Jus Sanguinis principle, which was the sole criteria of citizenship in the 1913 German citizenship law, provides citizenship for a person if his/her parent(s) are citizens of a particular nation and is historically based on the notion of a shared ethnicity.  Jus Soli, by contrast implies that all those born within the territorial boundaries of the nation, regardless of ethnicity, are automatically granted citizenship.  This principle was central to the French citizenship law enacted in 1889.   In India, citizenship is clearly spelt out in Part II of the Indian Constitution (articles 5-11) , and all three criteria are considered. The fact that Indian independence and the subsequent framing of the constitution were accompanied by the Partition of Undivided India into two nations – India and Pakistan, has meant that the Indian Citizenship act is extraordinarily liberal and makes no mention of ethnicity.  Article 5 of the Indian Constitution (Part II) clearly states that 
“At the commencement of this Constitution, every person who has his domicile
in the territory of India and-
(a) who was born in the territory of India; or
(b) either of whose parents was born in the territory of India; or
(c) who has been ordinarily resident in the territory of India for not less than five years immediately preceding such commencement, shall be a citizen of India.” 
There is a further provision for those migrating from the western provinces of the subcontinent (which is now Pakistan), Article 6 of the Constitution states:
“Rights of citizenship of certain persons who have migrated to India from Pakistan.- Notwithstanding anything in article 5, a person who has migrated to the territory of India from the territory now included in Pakistan shall be deemed to be a citizen of India at the commencement of this Constitution if-
(a) he or either of his parents or any of his grand-parents was born in India as defined in the Government of India Act, 1935 (as originally enacted); and
(b) (i) in the case where such person has so migrated before the nineteenth day of July, 1948, he has been ordinarily resident in the territory of India since the date of his migration, or
(ii) in the case where such person has so migrated on or after the nineteenth day of July, 1948, he has been registered as a citizen of India by an officer appointed in that behalf by the Government of the Dominion of India on an application made by him therefore to such officer before the commencement of this Constitution in the form and manner prescribed by that Government.
Provided that no person shall be so registered unless he has been resident in the territory of India for at least six months immediately preceding the date of his application.”
However, the creation of the category of the “citizen” is not a solely legal matter.  Rogers Brubaker defines citizenship as “a powerful instrument of social closure” which establishes “a conceptual, legal and ideological boundary between citizens and foreigners.”    But how is this boundary created?  In the case of a nation-state based on ethnicity, or for a theocratic state, the choices are easy (and dangerous), but for one like India, that is avowedly multicultural and secular, boundary creation poses a problem.  This binary of a strong and centralizing state on the one hand, and the demands of a federal, multicultural, secular constitution on the other, creates category anxieties.  What does it mean to be Indian?  How is that different form what it means to be Pakistani?  As Arjun Appadurai points out, “The nation state relies for its legitimacy on the intensity of its meaningful presence in a continuous body of bounded territory.  It works by policing its borders, producing its people, constructing its citizens, defining its capitals, monuments, cities, waters and soils, and by constructing its locales of memory and commemoration, such as graveyards, mausoleums and museums.”  The quest for a national identity card can be traced to this identity crisis of the Indian state.  It is a method by which the state imposes its “meaningful” presence on the citizen.  
Given that the Subcontinent has gone from one administrative entity (undivided India) in 1946 to three separate sovereign states (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) in 1971, this identity crisis is understandable.  We now see an almost paranoid urge to conclusively identify the “other”, the “outsider” and the “infiltrator”, simply to make the category of “citizen” more lucid.  This existentialist angst of the State is magnified by the presence of “minority” groups. Elia Zureik  points out that minorities represent groups that are not easy to categorise, fit into boxes and slot into society.  Their presence “poses a challenge to the overarching ideological framework of the nation state.”  Surveillance, border policing and people counting constitute mechanisms by which the state simultaneously constructs and identifies its citizens by constantly making the populace aware of the presence of the state, and of the experience of being part of a larger whole.  
The process of codifying and categorizing populations helps in creating the conceptual and ideological boundary between citizen and foreigner that Brubaker speaks of.  Gradually points of difference begin to emerge to reinforce these boundaries. The Population censes make citizens aware of the shared experience of nationhood, geography provides them with a mental image of the nation and history provides them with the sense of a common past. Reams of paper, ration cards, licenses, passports, voter ID cards – all give us a uniquely “Indian” identity with respect to the state and public institutions, and are the glue that holds the nation together. The identity card is the newest way to differentiate between a mass of people who look the same, speak the same language and have ancestral property “across the border.”  The outsider is now easily identified as the one without the national identity card and can be dealt with as seen fit.

Another explanation for the compulsive enumerative urge of the state is outlined by John Torpey’s  article, “Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate ‘Means of Movement’”.  Torpey argues that the rise of the modern nation state parallels the expropriation of the “Legitimate Means of Movement” by the State from private entities. By the term “Legitimate Means of Movement”, Torpey means that the citizen is not free to traverse certain spaces (like internal and international borders) and need state permission to do so.  This is in contrast to Medieval Europe where the serf or slave was bonded to land or master (a private entity) and needed their permission to travel.  This need for state permission implies that citizens are dependent on the state for an authenticated means of identification.  Thus, the idea of a nation is not just imagined, but is also codified as a group of people who cannot move beyond certain borders without permission.  This restriction on movement can be for a number of reasons that are intrinsic to the construction of the state, and are linked to the concept of sovereignty.  The state could restrict the movement of its citizens for a variety of reasons - national and territorial security, facilitation of law enforcement, exclusion, surveillance and the containment of ‘undesirables’.  Torpey defines the possible categories of undesirables as – “ethnic, national, racial or medical” .  Enforcement of such restraints requires the construction of an information superstructure - the state needs to codify its populations, develop an unambiguous means to identify its citizens, construct a bureaucracy to implement such a regime, and provide a legal framework to legitimize such a system.  The MNIC project shows that, like many states, the Indian state is deeply invested in such ideas of codification. Surveillance and identification provide the foundations for this structure.  They allow the state to comprehensively identify and define its citizens.  The ID card is the rarefied end product of a series of information packets chronicling the movements, economic transactions, familial ties and illnesses of the cardholder.

In defence of the citizen
While the construction of the ‘ideal’ or ‘normal’ citizen may prove useful for a state engaged in the process of nation building, the category of the “normal” citizen is a deeply problematic one.  David Allen Harvey  uses a case study of the province of Alsace to illustrate the consequences of over-zealous citizen construction.  
The province of Alsace had been a site of conflict between Germany and France through the 19th Century.  Both sides lay claim to it, and the province passed back and forth between the two empires for a considerable period of time.  In November 1918, at the close of World War I, France finally wrested control of Alsace after almost 50 years of German occupation.  The French army was welcomed with flowers and citizens streamed into the streets, proudly displaying their ‘Frenchness’ to their ‘liberators’.  In the spirit of the liberation, the French Government declared that the ‘mother’ had reclaimed her ‘lost child’, and rubbished any demands for a referendum to finally settle the status of the province.  Instead, arguing that over the years a number of Germans had settled in the province, the government set up Triage Commissions, in December 1918, in each district of the province to investigate individuals whose identities were “suspect”.  Harvey notes that the commissions consisted of prominent Alsatians whose patriotism was considered “beyond doubt” in official circles - rich, émigré Alsatian industrialists settled in Paris.  

The commissions resulted in the en-masse deportation of Germans who had resided in Alsace for the last 50 years.  The commission’s invitation to Alsatians to denounce those considered “suspect, only lead to a culture of denouncements and counter denouncements resulting in deep schisms in Alsatian society.  The composition of the panel ensured that the first to be deported were radical politicians and trade union leaders.  The committee also deported German workers as they felt that the Germans were “stealing” jobs meant for Alsatians.  Harvey notes “Residents who offended bourgeois notions of moral order could also be targeted.” Accordingly, the commissions also deported prostitutes, blackmarketeers and petty thieves.  The work of the commissions culminated in the categorization of the citizenry into four classes, graded on the basis of the nationality of their parents (Citizens with both –a French father and mother, were classified as Grade A citizens, while those with German parents were Grade D).  Finally, the citizens were issued colour coded identification cards that were to be carried at all times and produced when voting, applying for a job or availing of a government service.
On this basis, it can be argued that cards that seek to establish and fix identity are not just innocuous pieces of plastic, but are value-loaded and often divisive identity markers.  They are capable of marginalizing significant sections of society and alter the way we look at our fellow citizens and ourselves. 
In the subsequent sections of this paper I shall not only prove how the MNIC is structurally incapable of combating crime, but shall also explain how it might cause more harm than good.
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