Digital biometric authentication and citizens’ right to food: Neglect of the ‘local’ in India's Aadhaar-enabled Public Distribution System

Abstract

Despite an apparent alignment with global development goals focused on providing legal identity, India's digital and biometric based Aadhaar system continues to struggle in translating welfare gains to people. This concern is much more pronounced in its use for authenticating beneficiaries in the country's right to food programme, the Public Distribution System (PDS). While the introduction of the Aadhaar enabled PDS (AePDS) technology promised inclusion and better service experience, many studies have pointed to the contrary. In this study, we use a theoretical lens derived from complexity theory to gain insights into the concerns that continue to exist in large digital governance projects like AePDS. Fieldwork for this study involved 1600 respondents from below poverty line (BPL) households spread over two provinces and four districts. We find that the AePDS technology design and implementation process has been largely oblivious to the diversity and the emergent nature of relationships in local social contexts, and a failure to appreciate this complexity has promoted self-adaptation behavior with detrimental effects to the food security of poorer households. We advocate for a deeper engagement to understand the local, in all its complexity, and design digital governance initiatives for flexibility, with possibility of customization and adaptation to incorporate specificities of diverse contexts, in order to increase their chances of contribution to governance outcomes considered valuable for marginal population groups.