Vol - XLIX No. 36, September 06, 2014 | Anant Maringanti
The statewide Intensive Household Survey conducted in Telangana is similar to many such surveys carried out in undivided Andhra Pradesh. The data collected and used by state and non-state parties have political implications. One is of "data convergence", that is, intelligence about individuals that can be gathered by overlaying two or more data sets. The other is of "data travel", that is, the ability of many agents to access the data. In the absence of any safeguards, the conduct of the IHS and its emotionally charged context must be a matter of concern.
Anant Maringanti (amaringanti@gmail.com) is an urban geographer with Hyderabad Urban Lab, a multidisciplinary critical urban research programme.
The government of the newly formed state of Telangana organised a one-day household survey across the state on 19 August which was titled “Samagra Kutumba Survey” or state-wide Intensive Household Survey (IHS). The massive exercise attracted national attention. The Ministry of Home Affairs reportedly kept tabs on the exercise.
The Telangana government was accused of malafide intention by several groups. While some were worried about being marked as “non-natives”, many simply found it challenging to be at “home” to claim nativity. The anxieties largely centred on the timing and the manner in which the survey was conducted and the uses to which the data could be put. It was mainly suspected that the state was attempting to determine the nativity of individuals to deny state benefits and potentially persecute those identified as non-natives, specifically families who migrated to the region from other districts in the erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh.
Just prior to the survey, the Government of Telangana was locked in a battle with the Government of Andhra Pradesh over fee reimbursement for college students, insisting that only those whose families migrated into Telangana prior to 1956 would be covered by the scheme. This background aggravated the anxieties around the question of nativity. The survey was announced on 1 August with a tight schedule and was immediately challenged in court. Legally, it was contended that the state government did not follow the rules and provisions of the Collection of Statistics Act 2008. The government, on its part, gave an undertaking to the court that no one would be forced to divulge personal information. The government also announced that apart from being used to determine bogus beneficiaries, the survey will not be used to identify nativity in any general manner.
According to media reports, thousands of families returned to Hyderabad and other districts of Telangana from as far as Surat, Kolkata and Chennai. Although several versions of the survey form appeared in print and online, the final version distributed by the government did not contain any questions that could directly lead to determination of nativity.
Two days prior to the survey, government staff, volunteers and contracted staff numbering nearly 3,70,000 personnel visited houses and placed marks on them and distributed forms. In many rural areas, police personnel were also tasked with enumeration. On the day of the survey, all public transportation was shut down, para-transit operators did not venture out, and offices and business establishments were closed. Participation was near total – except in areas which the surveyors could not reach due to lack of time. People in general reported via social media that enumerators were courteous and did not coerce anyone for any data. Although the survey form originally asked for a variety of documents, these were collected only from those who were beneficiaries of government schemes under various categories.
At the end of the day, the chief minister of Telangana, K Chandrasekhar Rao, jubilantly announced that the survey was a “super hit”. Immediately after the survey, the government declared that the total number of households in Hyderabad far exceeded the number recorded in the Census of 2011. This did not come as a surprise to those who observed the survey process in localities and noted that many families who had reported themselves to the census enumerators as joint families, had during the survey reported themselves as separate households. This was largely prompted by the fact that benefits were believed to be tied to registration in this database. Subsequently, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation indicated that a number of houses missing from the property tax database and a number of property tax defaulters had been identified.
Long-term Effects
This commentary is an attempt to take stock of the issues surrounding the IHS and to move the focus away from a discussion of immediate motives to a discussion of the long-term political and economic effects of surveys as state practice at this juncture. Such a discussion must begin by taking note of the fact that in scale and scope the IHS conducted by the Government of Telangana is very much in conformity with the surveys carried out by previous governments in Andhra Pradesh over the last 20 years. The contention here is that large-scale intensive household data gathering has played a significant political and finance-related role in post-liberalisation India. These data gathering exercises are conducted at sub-national scales (state- and city-wide exercises).
The foundation for this in the region was laid in 1995, the year widely accepted by scholars, political observers and the public as when the Government of Andhra Pradesh set out on a massive economic restructuring programme. That year, the Telugu Desam Party came to power after a gap of seven years riding on a massive anti-incumbency sentiment. The popular government led by the late N T Rama Rao (NTR), was dislodged by his son-in-law Chandrababu Naidu through an internal coup in the family and the ruling party.
Fighting for political legitimacy among a population that was largely sympathetic to NTR, Naidu, who was yet determined to launch a radical economic reform programme, began a series of programmes that on the face of it brought the government to the doorstep of households. What went largely unnoticed at that time was that the government and the ruling party also used these programmes to generate massive amounts of data on households. The degree of penetration that state and market agencies gained into households at that time was unprecedented.
Government officials visited each and every household in the entire state and collected information on all the important parameters. Titled the Multipurpose Household Survey (MPHS), this database comprised 76.5 million crore records each having 50 fields (parameters) covering the personal, social and economic status of every citizen and was linked to policing and to welfare programmes equally. It was integrated with the Human Development Survey (HDS) data which had data pertaining to the household. Integrated checklists of MPHS/HDS data were printed and validations were done by distributing them to all the households. The database was updated in 1997, 1998, 2000 and in 2011. As part of the state-citizen interface the data was used to issue caste, date of birth (DOB) and nativity certificates. In 2012, the Government of Andhra Pradesh claimed that the state reported that Aadhaar enrolment in the state was 100%. That both MPHS and Aadhaar enrolments data in the state was riddled with flaws and frauds is a matter of record.
The Telangana government’s claim in defence of the recent survey – the IHS – is precisely that it is seeking to create a more robust database than the MPHS. Politically, the government and the ruling party is cashing in on its legitimacy and reinforcing it through the discourse around the survey. Against this background, discussion of the issues relating to the survey can be broadly organised around the following issues.
Coverage and Penetration: The IHS cannot possibly claim to achieve more than the MPHS in terms of coverage and penetration. But it promises to be better in terms of quality because of the adoption of some specific measures. First, it was conducted on a single day, with a public holiday declared and the suspension of most transportation services created a bandh-like environment. This, it is claimed, would have made it impossible for anyone to enrolled from two locations. Second, information related to bank accounts and Aadhaar card enrolment were also sought so that data could be verified and triangulated. Third, survey respondents were asked to sign a form vouching for the accuracy of the information. To what extent these measures have ensured accuracy of data is a matter of empirical detail. But it is certain that IHS is an advancement over MPHS mainly in intensity. Both are aimed at turning the territory into a bankable holding and a secure territory.
Discursive Strategy: In implementing the IHS, the government deployed the same arguments as for the Aadhaar enrolment. First, pronouncements by government spokespersons made it appear like a mandatory requirement for every citizen, then in the court the government representative gave an undertaking that participation in the survey and disclosure of information would be entirely voluntary and yet other agencies hinted that the information provided will be linked to benefits. The government insisted that the database will be used to eliminate duplicate and bogus entries. Going by the state’s impressive success in eliminating bogus ration cards prior to this massive data collection (lakhs of bogus ration cards were reported to have been surrendered to public distribution system (PDS) agents), data does not appear to be a prerequisite for eliminating local corruption. After all, local corruption is a matter of political will and not of central database management. Yet, the need for the database for the stated purposes was broadly accepted by many observers.
Legality and Legitimacy: As instruments of statecraft, surveys are often used both to build legitimacy and use available legitimacy. The Government of Telangana was quite successful in mobilising legitimacy through rhetorical devices such as distancing itself from the legacy of bad databases of Andhra Pradesh. By and large, the people of Telangana have been willing to give time to the government to prove itself on this count. The Telangana Rashtra Samithi has managed to reinforce its legitimacy both as a party and as government. The survey, in fact, came shortly after two rounds of elimination of bogus ration cards with lingering doubts that there could be more such cards. It came after a round of people’s planning initiative in the end of July with the ambitious aim of covering all gram panchayats in less than a fortnight for the collection of plans and proposals related to 25 aspects. Against this broad-based enthusiasm, partisan anxieties did not carry much force. As state strategy and as political strategy, this is not different from the manner in which the first MPHS was conducted in 1995.
Legally, however, both MPHS and IHS skated on thin ice. Legal experts are divided on whether the survey is illegal per se. However, what has gone without comment is the distinction between a survey and a census. Surveys are generally conducted to understand broad features of a population. The census is a headcount with detailed information about each member of the population. The data that Census of India gathers is not released to the public at the disaggregated level. What is more, much to the frustration of researchers, census data of migration even at the aggregate level is released only after a time lapse. These practices of reticence on the part of the Census of India have been established through decades of census-taking experience. Further, the questions that can be asked of respondents are designed by experts through several iterative exercises.
What MPHS and IHS have accomplished is a census-like operation under the name of a survey. The trouble with these operations is that even the norms of census-taking do not apply here. Different government agencies can insert questions into the questionnaire to suit their requirements. The entire data processing work is outsourced, databases circulate around in grey markets for a long time. The data sought in such surveys often reflects a desire to reach deep inside households to gather information to create a 360 degree awareness – which is potentially useful not just for policymaking but for cadre building, identifying tax evaders, persecution of rivals, policing, political strategy making and of course assessing credit worthiness or even penal action for debt recovery. In the last 20 years, we have seen all this being accomplished by state and non-state actors with impunity.
In short, the crux of the matter is the political implications of “data convergence”, that is, intelligence about individuals that can be gathered by overlaying two or more data sets. And the implications of “data travel”, that is, the ability of agents beyond the immediate and specific context of implementation of government programmes to access the data. In the absence of any safeguards against this, the conduct of the survey, the emotionally charged context around it – despite it enjoying broad local legitimacy – must be a matter of concern.
Whose Right to Privacy?
At a conceptual level, discussions on privacy have tended to gather around two extreme and somewhat simplified positions. One of them builds on James Scott’s arguments in his book Seeing Like a State (1998) and understands the state as an oppressive apparatus which needs to constantly render its own territory and populations legible for governance through surveys and statistics. And the other builds on a suggestion made by Stuart Corbridge et al in the book Seeing the State (2005) and understands the people of the developing economies as those who seek to be seen by the state, in fact hankering to be visible to the state and market to become eligible for benefits of various kinds. These positions, while helpful, miss out the specificity of post-liberalisation enumeration exercises.
It has been demonstrated again and again that beyond the grand designs of the modern abstract state, repressive state institutions and non-state actors want access to personal identities of individuals for specific immediate goals. Non-state actors such as political parties and finance capital wants to see the innards of households in order to be able to strategise and calculate. And households do feel the imperative to expose themselves in order to qualify for benefits but also tactically want to conceal themselves from intrusion by state and markets.
This is the space of privacy, and choice and security that is denied to the poor. It is the space where duplicate identities are not necessarily a matter of choice but a tactic of coping. It is also that space where the thinness of the law regulating data collection, distribution and exposure in India strikes one as appalling. It is a thinness which makes it possible for one agency of the government to announce that registration with Aadhaar is voluntary and another to withdraw LPG subsidy from consumers who do not produce proof of Aadhaar enrolment. It is this thinness which allowed the Government of Telangana to give an undertaking that participation in the survey is voluntary and yet not print the same on the forms on which survey respondents vouched for the accuracy of the data. And the entire data is being processed by private companies with no evidence of any rules and infrastructure in place to regulate the security of the data.
It is time debates on privacy in India attended to these specifics of the needs of those on the margins of the formal global economy.
References
Corbridge, S, G Williams, M K Srivastava and René Véron (2005): Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).
Scott, James C (1998): Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
