History & Policy

Pawan Singh (Deakin University, Melbourne): Biometrics, identity and privacy in India In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of mandatory Aadhaar, the Indian government's biometric programme that was launched in 2009 and challenged in the Supreme Court 2010 onwards. Civil society groups, lawyers and pro-privacy activists challenged Aadhaar's mandatory linkage to various state-sponsored benefit databases for the Aadhaar scheme's potential to bring about a surveillance state. This presentation provides an overview of the Indian data privacy debate in the context of Aadhaar and identifies some key policy issues. It also reflects on the place of privacy as a legal right, technological affordance and social and cultural practice in India. Pawan Singh is a media studies researcher and a New Generation Network Scholar in Contemporary Histories at Deakin University. His research concerns issues of privacy, social justice and mediation of identity in India within a transnational framewo