Identities Project – Episode 4
Article 1 – Stories From The Other Side of the Transaction
The Paan and the PAN-Wallah
After lunch on a hot day conducting interviews in Delhi, one of the Identities Project researchers felt like having a ‘paan’, a betelnut digestive in India which invokes Marmite-like reactions from many – you either love it or hate it. The café owner gave us directions to the paan-wallah at the top of the street, then he laughed and added “Oh, he also makes PAN if you want it – he is the PAN-wallah too” (PAN stands for Permanent Account Number – needed as income tax ID in India). We interviewed him and joked he should have a sign saying ‘paan and PAN here’. Later that evening, we had a prolonged team discussion on the many layers of intermediaries which emerge in India – formal, informal, enabling, constraining, fee-based and volunteers.
Access to identity systems is almost always mediated through other actors – both formal (like Aadhaar agents) and informal (like the PAN-wallah), and both have different kinds of motivation.
What are the day to day practices ‘across the desk’ from the end user or citizen? What motivates these intermediaries to be helpful or unhelpful? Are they themselves supported enough by their institutions or not? What kinds of innovations (‘jugaad’) develop amongst mediators to negotiate the confines of the state? And finally, how can we better understand the reasons why practices and workarounds may have emerged, and feed them up to systems designers?
The many varieties of intermediary
Early in our research, we spent many weeks at Garudahalli, a village about three hours north of Bengaluru. In addition to the fifty or so interviews with residents, we also talked to the intermediaries who enable these processes – the Panchayat (village government) office; the SIM card provider, the ration dealer and so on. Around midday on one working day in December, we were talking to Tangamma, a teacher in a local school. Tangamma and her assistant were responsible for the care of around fifteen children aged between 2-5 years, providing their food card (which then leads to their name being added to the ration card), their birth certificate (which then leads to getting the school certificate later or directly to an Aadhaar card), as well as loans and benefits for local women.
Half-way through the interview, a group of women came in, and Tangamma broke off to talk to them, the started to make a few calls. When she came back to talk to us, she was frustrated: “It’s been three months since these women and their children went for enrollment at the Aadhaar center, and they still have not received their card. So I called and spoke to my supervisor (at the district office). She has asked me to note down the Aadhaar enrollment number of these people, along with their names and date of enrollment. She wants me to WhatsApp her. She said she will follow up.” To show the waiting women she was serious about following up, Tangamma wrote down all their details and took a photo of her notebook to send to the supervisor. But since she had no data remaining on her phone, she asked us to also take a photo and send it to her supervisor on her behalf.
When we were drawing our ‘village map’ of intermediaries in Garudahalli (to be published), we remembered we had sent a message by WhatsApp on behalf of Tangamma
Echoes of Tangamma’s commitment to help, and her palpable frustration about constraints, played out repeatedly in different ways during our research. Intermediaries went out of their way to help others – Doddaraghu, a ration dealer, said he often gave advance rations to newcomers if their ration cards had not been set up, or stepped in if they needed form-filling help. He said “They are supposed to take it [the form to the office]. But if they say it is difficult for them, they say ‘brother, please help me and submit it yourself,’ and I help them by taking it.”
There were helpful intermediaries, but also those we observed or heard of that were indifferent, or deliberately obstructive. Jamima – a cart-seller in Kesarpur, a peri-urban garment factory site near New Delhi – told us how school teachers refused to help in filling out Aadhaar forms for their children. An applicant for Aadhaar told us in passing of a rumour that the Aadhaar centre franchisee was known to be unhelpful to members outside his religious group, although we could not verify this.
Intermediaries can be frustrated and vulnerable themselves
The Principles of Identification state that “currently, most legal identification is provided by or on behalf of governments. In the future, other models may be possible, but governments should retain the ultimate accountability for legal identification
But the Principles don’t go into how this provision happens in practice – what is the role of the intermediary, the broker, the agent?
Akhil Gupta uses his example of Malik, a Block Development Officer, in his book Red Tape. Malik only comes to hear of a pension scheme awareness camp to be held in the following week from a villager who walks in to ask about it. Gupta writes:
“It would be easy to adopt a cynical perspective on the motivations of state bureaucrats and politicians and blame them … Like any other class of people, bureaucrats sometimes fit that image. However, like Malik … many hard-working bureaucrats were often frustrated by their inability to work effectively to bring about real changes in the lives of the poor.”
Michael Lipsky wrote in 1980 about ‘street-level bureaucrats’ – those who have to translate and simplify what seem sometimes as bloated policies issued from a faceless state. Often in our research, the level of confusion about identity cards processes was so high that we heard people ask us: “So, are you doing these interviews because the government is thinking about another type of identity card?”. This is how many citizens see the state and identification, and this was where the pivotal, applied role of the person on the other side of the desk came in – but they too are ‘at risk’ in a sense, because they are not always up to date with the latest policies, or they have to use their discretion to help users.
Non-official, but institutionalized intermediaries
Tangamma and Gupta’s Malik are examples of formal agents. Those like the PAN-wallah don’t officially hold a position but have become informal intermediaries. These include people we talked to who sat outside the district headquarters in the 40-degree heat shielded by umbrellas, helping fill in forms for a fee. When we asked at the grille of the government office for information, we were told instead to go to these intermediaries who would explain the process of obtaining a caste certificate better.
Like the PAN-wallah above, or stationery and photocopy shops and agents who are attuned to PAN cards and Aadhaar cards, these intermediaries become unofficial sources of information – including what counts as proof of identity, whether an original is needed or a photocopy would do, how long the process might take, and so on. One of the aims of our research is to map these intermediaries, and intermediaries of intermediaries – both government, private and others.
Non-official, non-institutionalized intermediaries
Another relationship to explore is that of family and friends. We frequently heard interviewees talk about friends who had helped them. Ajit, a pani-puri seller, said his daughter’s birth certificate had been eaten by a rat, but a doctor who they knew helped procure another one. In Assam, a Bengali interviewee opening a bank account said: “The bank staff know me from before. They are also Bengalis. We know each other well. The manager of that branch, he is my brother’s friend. He did not feel the need to ask me anything”.
Women often asked their fathers or brothers to help them, but in some cases also deliberately aimed to build their confidence. Moromi, an 18-year-old, lower-middle income woman we interviewed in Guwahati, said her father filled in her PAN and voter identity forms to help her, but “for a few of the forms like bank forms, I filled it up because my father wanted me and my sister to learn how to fill up the form”. These examples demonstrate what we know – relationships matter – but the last example also raises the question of how much we don’t know about capacity building and intermediaries, both their own and that of others, and both formal and informal intermediaries.
Our transaction stories method
One of the research methods we were excited about was a Rashomon-type method where we hung around sites of identity transactions, observed, made notes on and interviewed multiple actors – suppliers, providers, bureaucrats, and citizens. As both the World Development Report 2015 and the GSMA case studies of identity systems in Pakistan, Tanzania and Côte d’Ivoire illustrate, emotions, thoughts and previous experiences all contribute to behavior. Every identity transaction requires an information exchange with elements of both codified and tacit exchanges, although the fusion of technology and politics is pushing increasingly toward the former. Although codified transactions are more efficient, recordable, reproducible, and visible, agents and intermediaries often have to ‘bend the rules’. At the heart of our transaction stories, we wanted to illustrate these tensions:
- Both sides feel.
- Both sides risk.
- Both sides trust.
- Both sides have expectations about what they (and the other) should do – and both sides perform for the other side according to these scripts
- Both have likely been wronged and disappointed before.
- Both think they how the ‘game’ works, and what each ID artifact means in the game.
What increases the tension in identity transactions is that both sides don’t necessarily agree on any of the above points, and that all but the first are made more complex when power is unequal, which it usually is. We will be exploring the results of our twenty or so transaction stories in our final report, including a visualization of these power dynamics.
The intermediary is a user too
Going back to Tangamma at the start of this piece, we wrote in our field notes:
After an hour or so, a village resident comes with another Aadhaar enrolment acknowledgement document and says she has not received her Aadhaar card yet. She says that the Panchayat office has advised her to quote her name, date of enrollment and her enrollment number to the Aadhaar office. Tangamma tells her that she has already got similar complaints from other women and will be looking into it shortly. She showed us a list she has made in the Anganwaadi register, and said “This is a list of everyone whose Aadhaar has not come yet. Here are their names, the enrollment number as written on their acknowledgement sheet and the date of registration. I will have to send this by WhatsApp”.
In the fieldwork for this research, we saw many instances where intermediaries helped people unfamiliar with identity processes, because those processes are new, or for reasons of literacy.
At other times – and this is true especially where people lack specific paperwork or proofs – they suggest workarounds, or leverage their social networks to get things done. At the same time, we also found instances of brokers (enrolment agents) who made it harder for certain demographics (for example, those of a different religion, caste, income group) to be included in an identity system. New, unscrupulous intermediaries can emerge, such as landlords in Kesarpur, our peri-urban site, who realized their power in providing proof of address documents, and either refused them, charged for them, or harassed those who needed them.
We need to understand that an intermediary is not a neutral channel. Because intermediaries are critical connectors and gatekeepers, valued for their social connections and for their discretion in dealing with borderline or tricky cases, it is hard to categorically associate them with either inclusion or exclusion. They can bring in people who might otherwise not have been able to get into identity systems, but at the same time, use their discretion to keep certain others out, even where they are technically eligible for inclusion. We have found again and again that it is impossible to think of intermediaries in identity systems without thinking about power structures and politics, even though identity systems themselves are portrayed as systems that treat everyone equally.
While we are still building our typologies of intermediaries, what we can emphasize is this: it is critical that new identity ecologies pay attention to existing and new intermediaries, and the influence they exert in including/excluding people. This is important because all human beings exercise biases and prejudices, because these intermediaries have access to so much personally identifiable information, and both are particularly problematic in the absence of privacy laws. We will discuss the implications of these in our next episode on vulnerabilities and privacy.
Article 2 – How Your Feedback has Changed the Identities Project Research
One of the distinctive features of the Identities Project is that it engages with the audience as the research is taking place. To do this, we designed a combination of the episodic outputs with roundtable discussions where we would solicit input from our audience that could feed back into the research itself. Here, we’d like to share how that feedback cycle is building better research.
The roundtables in April were incredibly rich in dialogue with diverse perspectives and questions. One participant raised a question that explored the kinds of technological répertoire that people have in their lives.
After all, we’re looking at some of the poorest of the poor – people who often won’t have a smartphone, or internet access at home. Through that discussion, we recognized that we hadn’t explored this enough in the research to date
It’s a vital question because, of course, we’re trying to analyze what benefits identity technologies bring to users – not to the designers and owners of those technologies.
But what happens when those objects, or the context around them, changes? A heavy metal fan who’s uncomfortable with Iron Maiden t-shirts being sold in Topshop, or inspiring tour merchandise for Justin Bieber, can begin to get a sense of how Mayan weavers might feel when they see their spiritual leaders’ clothes on Miss Guatemala. When the popular perception of the artefacts that we use to define ourselves shifts from cultural to merely transactional – where they become economic units, thought of primarily in terms of their economic value – it erodes that part of our identity.
Participants in Delhi and Bengaluru noted that, if an identity system isn’t designed to work for users from the start, it raises further issues around how much it can be revised or shifted in some way later on.
This was seen as particularly important around the issue of privacy.
So, we took that insight and revised the questionnaire that our researchers have been using up until this point for the final phase of the project in Assam and Delhi. We already have a process in place where the researchers would first ask interviewees about their inventory of identity credentials. (“What do you have in your wallet right now? When did you last use them? What was it like using them?” and so forth.) We added questions like: “Do you have a phone? Do you have access to the internet at home? What kinds of devices do you have?”
The other way we adapted our protocol in response to session feedback was to expand the timeframe we asked about – so not just asking about the last week of transactions, but about the past three months to a year.
When we asked variants on “what if people find out about your personal information?” it seemed as if people didn’t particularly care; whereas when we started asking “what are things that you wouldn’t want other people to know about you?”, the responses were much more revealing. It was a shift from the established way of talking about privacy – focusing on personally identifiable information (PII) – to a more harms-based perspective of data breaches. It’s been very productive in giving people a better way to articulate their feelings on the issue, which in turn helps our understanding of their concerns, particularly in that it’s helped open the conversational door to related issues around social media practices.
Another point that was posed in Bengaluru was that, when you look at questions around the technologies people use to prove their identities, it’s worth asking about whether they have a choice in which technology or system they use. It’s a question that can reveal a lot about the power dynamics in these systems – and of course, it turns out that people rarely do have a choice.
For example, we went to a community bank in rural Assam, and interviewed customers as they came in. There was a school cook who wanted to know if she’d been paid – her last paycheck was two months overdue – and so she tried to use the biometric fingerprint reader to access her account. It didn’t work, until the bank agent grabbed her hand and forcibly held her thumb down on the reader.
That kind of moment is significant because these identity technologies are presented as empowering individuals to be in charge of how their information is managed, and to be in control of their interactions with services like a bank account.
In most countries, including India, one of the dimensions to that is the question of gender.
A woman’s ability to control over who enters her personal space points towards where the limits of her autonomy lie.
And when you see someone being physically guided by a bank agent when trying to use a service that should be increasing her autonomy, it’s a huge contrast with the claim that identity technologies are about empowering individual autonomy.
In conducting this research, we have experimented with an engagement mechanism that has enabled an audience to feedback into the research as it is happening. This has been challenging, but has made the research stronger. We’d like to thank everyone who has participated so far.
Article 3 – Making Identity Systems Work: Bureaucrats Are Users Too
Our episodes so far have been focusing on the users of identity systems – but there’s one group of users we haven’t examined yet: the people, bureaucrats and officials, working the identity system frontline.
In this story, we look at identity transactions from the perspective of the bureaucrats and frontline staff who are responsible for implementing identity systems in India. Are they following process blindly?
Who do they take their lead from? Answers to questions like these can help us understand how and why systems work the way they do. After all, every person who needs to get their identity verified has to interact with someone who officially signs off on the verification – we shouldn’t ignore one whole half of those transactions.
Mahadev is a manager at a Karvy Aadhaar Enrolment Centre (AEC) in Bengaluru – a company that has an agreement with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for Aadhaar enrolment. He tells us that they accept 18 different types of document as proof of original identity, and 13 types of document as address proof, though UIDAI actually has a list of 35 documents that can be presented for the latter. The responsibilities of the AEC include collecting an applicant’s photo and biometric data. Mahadev clarifies, however, that the actual verification of documents and issuing of the Aadhaar card are UIDAI’s responsibility. He clearly delineates between the AEC and UIDAI’s work – and acknowledges that rejection of an application by UIDAI based on mismatched details is not the AEC’s fault.
In Delhi, we spoke to a domestic helper while she was trying to get her Aadhaar number at a private intermediary’s office. She needed it to apply for a passport so that she could travel abroad with her employers. However, the only relevant documents she had – her voter and ration cards – were linked to her village address in West Bengal. Upon probing further, she told us that she did not want to apply for a passport from West Bengal because her employer could help her get a passport much more quickly through his connections if she were to apply from Delhi.
Multiple options were offered by staff at the Aadhaar application office, and rejected as none of them would help solve her problem. For example, a letter from someone like a gazetted officer or MLA would mean she needed to know someone of that rank from the list of officials published by UIDAI, but she did not. Similarly, getting a bank pass book would mean she had to open a bank account in Delhi, but to do that she needed an Aadhaar number, taking her back to square one. Someone then suggested a workaround: a letter with a passport-sized photograph affixed, from a doctor at a government hospital who could vouch that she was a local resident. This signed and stamped document would be “by far the easiest to obtain”, he said. Interestingly, this solution wasn’t part of the list of officially accepted documents – he simply offered a suggestion that he would be able to sign off on, probably assuming that the higher authorities would accept it. This is a good example of “jugaad”, or a hack, a term popularized by Jaideep Prabhu of the University of Cambridge. Shaamappa is a Gram Panchayat member in Garudahalli, in rural Karnataka, where he wields significant power.
The Gram Panchayat is the village body that helps local residents obtain documents like death certificates, as well as helping them with processes like linking their Aadhaar to their ration card so that food can be collected from the government.
Unlike Mahadev, who we spoke to in Bengaluru, Shaamappa perceives Aadhaar as a legally mandated document. Mahadev was aware that the Supreme Court had not yet ruled on whether Aadhaar cards were mandatory, while Shaamappa said that they already were.
Shaamappa, in his work with the Gram Panchayat, is a key figure for locals below the poverty line (Rs. 17,155 per annum being the urban poverty line and Rs. 11,680 per annum the rural poverty line), especially when they need housing or housing loans.
The Panchayat has its own method of verifying information – an informal process based simply on recognizing an applicant by face, or speaking to someone who can vouch for them.
Shaamappa is also responsible for providing identity cards for verifying a person is eligible to receive welfare. There are three categories of people who might qualify: those in extreme poverty (or “Anthyodaya”); those below the poverty line (BPL); and those above the poverty line (APL). For those asking for an APL card, the main factor is someone’s job – Shaamappa says “that itself gives us a fair idea of how much they must be earning.”
For a BPL applicant, it’s usually daily wage earners who qualify, while daily wage earners who also don’t have children would qualify for the extreme poverty category “because they have no one to care for them and the government is the last house of appeal and mercy for them”. Though this part of the process is certainly subjective, he says “we take all IDs such as proof of residence, electricity bills, Aadhaar card and such” before actually handing out the cards.
58-year-old Doddaraghu is the proprietor of the local ration store in Garudahalli, and is responsible for distributing grains and other necessities like kerosene, sugar, and oil via the Public Distribution System (PDS).
Doddaraghu has to maintain strict records and makes sure that each ration card holder gets only the government-allotted amount. The only card people bring when they come to his store is the ration card, but their Aadhaar number does need to be linked to it if they want to collect what they are due, he says. He likes the linking of identities, and believes it helps prevent fraud, as the government has claimed. However, he says that just as with voter fraud, which is common in his area, as his village is on the border between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, people do sometimes have duplicate Aadhaar numbers too. He is not exactly sure how this happens.
Doddaraghu doesn’t always separate the personal from the professional, and occasionally gives people he recognizes their grain allocation even if they don’t have their ration card – though he does ask them to apply for a new one by submitting a letter of request to the local Taluk (administrative district) office. Some people ask him to submit it on their behalf; in these cases he willingly takes on the additional role of an enabling intermediary.
The anecdotes above indicate that there is no single fixed process followed by everyone charged with identity verification.
There are also a number of different agents in the process as we have indicated in this story, from staff at a private intermediary’s office to managers of official Aadhaar Enrollment Centers and ration card shop owners, to name just a few.
Circumstances and roles of these enrollment agents vary hugely between urban and rural areas, and in a country like India, there are also significant variations between states and regions. Ultimately, it is useful to keep in mind that street-level bureaucrats (a term coined in 1969 by Michael Lipsky) are also users of the system. Though they might not be the end users, they are very much part of the process and are rarely completely neutral as they might be expected to be.
