e-Topia: China, India and Biometric Borders

The research project 'e-Topia: China, India and biometric borders' examines the effects of digitization in the two largest emerging economies in Asia: India and China. The project explores everyday experiences of digital welfare and platform services for use on mobile phones, new payment systems and e-commerce solutions. We also look at the regulation of such services in the individual countries, and how developments in the two countries affect technological innovation worldwide. The project is a collaboration between researchers in Norway, India and China, and attempts to give researchers from these countries the opportunity to meet for debate about the connections between technological innovation and social development. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, health and welfare services have increasingly focused on monitoring the state of health in the population and at the individual level. The project investigates how public and privately-owned databases, networks and applications function as elements in a complex system of services, and how this has affected everyday life and welfare provision in India and China, during and after the pandemic. In China, we have investigated the use of mobile applications as a part of China's pandemic response, particularly in the implementation of the 'Zero COVID' policy, from early 2021 to late 2022. As a result of the 'Zero COVID' policy, local governments across China were required to develop their own mobile-based health applications. The so-called 'Health Kits' collected large amounts of data about users, including data obtained from the users' digital payments and location data captured by the user's mobile phone. In India, a pandemic tracking and monitoring app was made mandatory for all government employees. After the pandemic, a cloud-based archive of health data called the National Health Stack has contributed to the traceability of Indian citizens' health data and use of healthcare services to a whole new extent. India's parliament has so far failed to pass a data protection law, raising serious civil society concern about issues of online privacy, identity theft and data misuse. The growing use of digital welfare solutions (e-governance) in both public and private service delivery has made identification increasingly important. This is true in China as well as in India. Digital welfare solutions depend on digital archives and national ID cards. India has introduced a system known as Aadhaar, based on the presentation of identity papers and the collection of biometric data (iris scans and fingerprints), where each citizen is assigned a 12-digit unique ID number. Enrollment in the Aadhaar scheme is not mandatory, but life can be difficult without an Aadhaar card. Banks, mobile providers, insurance companies and a number of government agencies base their services on Aadhaar, while government agencies can transfer everything from pensions to emergency aid directly to Aadhaar-linked bank accounts. Aadhaar's traceability and availability, anytime, anywhere, gives government agencies an opportunity to address inefficiencies, fraud and corruption in service delivery. Many providers have online facilities that can verify Aadhaar numbers. Aadhaar identification is also required by mobile service providers, insurance companies, banks and schools, and 'Fair Price' shops that distribute affordable food to the population through the Public Distribution System. Aadhaar enrollment is open to all residents of India. Despite not serving as proof of citizenship, the owner of a valid Aadhaar number can link it to his Permanent Account Number (PAN) issued by tax authorities, and then apply for an Indian passport or use the Aadhaar card to vote in elections. In the northeastern Indian state of Assam, the digitization of the National Register of Citizens is an attempt to prevent illegal immigrants from claiming rights as Indian citizens. However, in the transition from physical archives of identity papers to digital datasets, a total of 1.9 million people have been omitted from the NRC. Most of these are suspected to be illegal immigrants and many of them are still waiting to know whether they have been approved as Indian citizens. Theories of modern state formation often assume that states become more efficient in their administration when they adopt information and communication technology (ICT), but the case of Assam calls this assumption into question. While digitization improves services for most people in India, in conflict-prone areas it can also reinforce social divides. Corruption, prejudice among bureaucrats and technical problems can lead to errors that, in this case, can affect a large number of individuals who are actually eligible for citizenship but who are now at risk of becoming stateless.

"e-Topia" refers to the place of the digital in visions of the future. The e-Topia project studies the digital as political, examining how India and China - the two most populous countries in the world - harness "smart" technologies to create new economic opportunities, more efficient governance, and more reliable and transparent welfare provision. The project examines policymaking on biometrics, e-governance, the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber sovereignty in India and China. It also investigates new forms of digital and cyber in/security due to increasing reliance on public-private partnerships, corporate software providers and data storage and processing faciltities, and tensions between the need for global standards and cyber sovereignty concerns. The project highlights the potential of biometric data registration to be coupled with ID scanning across sovereign territories, conflating border control, surveillance and digital governance. Travel between India and China is on the rise, although their high-altitude border remains unresolved. As the Asian contribution to the global smart technology market continues to grow, the relationship between India and China is increasingly dependent on the compatibility of their digitalization efforts. A key contribution of e-Topia is to study new forms of cyber-governance and its employment in the delivery of services, surveillance and border control in both the Asian giants, examining the trade-offs of e-governance solutions such as vulnerability to digital crime, ethnic profiling, monitoring, surveillance, and loss of privacy. With the introduction of biometric data registration and digital identification programs in a growing number of countries across the world, concerns about cyber insecurity and digital vulnerability are mounting. e-Topia will generate new knowledge on the e-governance and IoT strategies of India and China, their digital relations, and their common "e-Topian" dreams.