Governance and Accountable Citizenship Through Identification Infrastructures: Database Politics of Copernicus (France) and National Register of Citizens (India)

• Published in: Science, technology & society (New Delhi, India) Vol. 25; no. 3; pp. 368 - 385
• Main Authors: Dagiral, Éric, Singh, Khetrimayum Monish
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New Delhi, India SAGE Publications 01.11.2020
• Subjects: Humanities and Social Sciences; Sociology; Categorisation; computerisation; identification infrastructure; database politics
• ISSN: 0971-7218; 0973-0796
• DOI: 10.1177/0971721820912895

Several governments around the world have developed new ways of registering citizens when it comes to their relations with the state administration. Contemporary practices of identification through databases open up new ways of institutional and governmental practices across various sectors. In France, the tax administration had become the flagship of the whole French e-government project. The first case study focuses on the Copernicus project, which rapidly raised concerns about the implications of identification practices for taxpayers/citizens/households/individuals through unique identifiers. The Indian case study focuses on the National Register of Citizens as a citizen identification infrastructure, the processes of trying to categorise a diverse demography into citizens and non-citizens, and the subsequent issues that arise around different claims to citizenship. Taking these two case studies, this article discusses two national databases in France (tax administration) and India (citizenship), respectively, as examples of contemporary state practices around digital identification infrastructures as a form of database politics to enforce accountable forms of citizen practices through which different forms of data driven institutional and sociotechnical processes are marking new changes in the state–citizen relationship, both in France and in India.