Bus Porters’ Petition for Aadhaar – A Political Analysis: Tarangini Sriraman
FEBRUARY 22, 2015
tags: Aadhar, ISBT Porters' Union, Jan Dhan Yojana, Mission Convergence, Unique Identification Project
Guest post by TARANGINI SRIRAMAN
Porters at ISBT (Image courtesy DNA)
Barely six years into its introduction, the Aadhaar project, otherwise known as the Unique Identification (UID) project has been studied and critiqued extensively – its promises to strengthen welfare delivery, curb corruption, exorcise ghost beneficiaries from government databases, initiate financial inclusion and enhance intra-governmental coordination have been enthusiastically received in certain corporate and technocratic circles and skeptically, if not scathingly viewed in other academic and journalistic quarters. The liberties this far-advanced project has taken with individuals’ privacy and its failure to acquire a statutory basis (even as enrollment drives continue unabated) have justly attracted severe censure. And until recently, the surreptitiously mandatory nature of the project – where welfare entitlements were linked to the possession of numbers – was cause for alarm. The Supreme Court judgment in 2013 challenging this mandatory linkage between Aadhaar and subsidies/entitlements may have slowed down processes of the number’s proliferation as an exclusive proof.
However, since the new government at the Centre took over, newer uses and linkages are being imagined. How indispensable the Aadhaar will be to such schemes and entitlements only time can tell: cases in point the Jan Dhan Yojana (JDY) and the linkage of the Aadhaar with the passport. As new linkages appear in place of the old, the new government is urging all of us to walk boldly into the embrace of biometric identification that will, to a certain extent, at least, pervade public transactions (for some) and their very socio-economic chances of welfare support (for most others). It was against this conceptual and empirical backdrop (so competently elucidated by the various scholars, lawyers and journalists following this project) that I decided, as part of my work on a larger book project, to speak with a migrant community in Delhi about their Aadhaar-related experiences – did they wish to get these numbers, if so why?
For these purposes, I picked a community of bus coolies or porters in North Delhi most of whom were migrants from different parts of the country and who stayed in a makeshift residence on the premises of the bus terminal. What were the political prisms of the porters’ unionized existence through which they viewed the project? What anxieties and aspirations underlay their responses to Aadhaar and this project’s assorted self-representations? Did this universal identity infrastructure translate into a specific set of urban resources that eased coolies into exclusive city-based schemes? And conversely, did the Aadhaar insulate this community from city-specific burdens of proof in matters of enumeration and access to welfare schemes?
Given that the Aadhaar claims to especially emancipate the migrant worker from encumbrances of being verified afresh for claiming city-based entitlements, this seemed like a valid line of inquiry. Considering that identification and enumeration processes have traditionally turned on stable residences, coherent city addresses and fixed IDs, it is egregious that the Aadhaar was sought not so much as a universal, nation-wide proof but as a point of entry into the city’s (Delhi’s) welfare networks. The argument this piece makes is that the porter community’s experiences underline the specifically urban stakes in acquiring an ostensibly fluid and mobile ID – the Aadhaar however seemed to fall short of these expectations as I shall demonstrate.
Over the last eight-nine months, I met and spoke with 70 porters and all the union members at ISBT, Kashmere Gate, and I also met transport department officials, interviewed UIDAI officials and visited Aadhaar enrollment camps in North Delhi. I also managed to speak to some bank officials to get a sense of linkages between the Aadhaar and JDY and the insurance angle in this new banking for the poor scheme.
As part of my earlier research on IDs, I had already spoken to a lot of food officials to better understand the working of welfare schemes meant for the urban poor encompassing the homeless, rural migrants and slum residents. By connecting the various dots that these interviews yielded, I hope to convey a picture of (a) the everyday politics of the porters’ petition for an Aadhaar (b) the incredibly formidable challenge that the porters faced in simply acquiring the Aadhaar and (c) the immense difficulties they faced in using it as a link to city-based welfare schemes.
At the end of this piece, I reproduce an Open Letter written by the Porters’ Union to the Unique Identification Authority of India, which expresses their understanding of the issue and how it impacts them.
I start with a brief sketch of the porter community at ISBT that will then allow us to reflect on their collective and individual anguish to be enumerated reflexively and to be given the freedom to create (to channel Lawrence Cohen’s ideas here) a variegated demographic field of one’s own choice.
A Short History of ISBT
The Maharana Pratap Inter-State Bus Terminal was created in the year 1976 and today, runs services between Delhi and seven other states, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand. Prior to this, a makeshift bus terminal was operational first in New Delhi and then Old Delhi. However, a high-end and spacious terminal that could accommodate the burgeoning numbers of inter-state passengers, with its own government-based regulatory authorities was desired. The Delhi Development Authority initially took over the operation and maintenance of the terminal and later the Delhi Transport Department became the governing authority in 1993.
Around the same time, two other bus terminals at Anand Vihar and Sarai Kale Khan also became functional. Over the years, this move saw the diversion of many crucial inter-state bus services to the new terminals, resulting in the steady decline of work for the porters at Kashmere Gate.
In the last few years, the porters have also been distressed about the declining commerce in their terminal which they see inversely proportionate to the increasing popularity of the other two bus terminals in the city. This prompted some of the porters to seek transfers to the new terminals and some even managed to get them; however, they failed to find work at these two new terminals owing to political and administrative tussles.
Ever since 2010, the Transport Department has authorized a fully government owned corporation called the Delhi Transport Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (DTIDCL) to operate and manage all functional and non-functional ISBTs (there are two non-functional terminals at Dwarka and Narela).
With this move, the porters too automatically became the charges of the new corporation. I use the word ‘charges’ here with some reservations – because although the corporation was to issue these porters new ID cards (where earlier, they were issued these by the Transport Department), they did not consider them their responsibilities in any paternalistic welfare sense. The Department and now, the Corporation has deliberately avoided treating these porters like government employees for that would entitle them to salary, pension, leave and insurance which have eluded them (even though the Union has repeatedly petitioned several Delhi government authorities for these privileges).
Relatively, the bus porters feel that the railway porters are better placed – they have one sanctioned holiday for the family per year, two uniforms for which they bear no cost, medical facilities at a railway hospital, concessions related to admission of children in railway schools subject to availability of seats.
Porters pointed out, that that in recent times, railway employees were even given permanent sweeper jobs. The only substantial government subsidy they ever received was a small piece of land which the DDA sanctioned to them in the 70s, conditional on the payment of a deposit. Owing to the deposit, only the relatively better-off porters could lay claim to these plots which were situated in Sunder Nagari near Dilshad Garden in North East Delhi.
Porters’ licenses
The porters at ISBT were originally inhabitants of different states in North, Northwest and South India like Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Most of them are seasonal lower caste or Muslim farmers who flit between ISBT and their fields because they find either source of income to be inadequate per se.
The ISBT porters’ union acts as a strong nodal point of the coolies’ negotiation with disparate authorities like the DDA, Transport Department and the Social Welfare Department among others. The union steps in to take care of various pressing everyday matters like applying for porters’ license, renewing such IDs, resolving questions of inheritance therein and fixing the shift system (where porters share the workload in an equitable arrangement where they are assigned spots on rotation). While the existence of the union has greatly sheltered and strengthened individual porters who wish to be taken seriously by authorities, it has occasionally wielded its formidable influence to get its own way in matters of porters’ appointments. The union has always believed that it was important to deny entry to those outside the existing kinship network. If they opened the gates to all job-seekers, then their daily wages, already compromised by the two new terminals, would shrink even further. And so the union bitterly fought a dozen men who in the early 90s sought work outside this network, but the outsiders sued the union and the Delhi Transport Department in the Delhi High Court and eventually won.
Porter licenses or ID cards can be ‘inherited’ or passed on from father to son, brother to brother, father-in-law to son-in-law, grandfather to grandson (both son’s son and daughter’s son), uncle to nephew (both sister’s son and brother’s son). Some of these relationships were recently recognized as legitimate for purposes of inheritance – they were the result of the sustained pressure that the union brought to bear on successive Transport Department Ministers to recognize indirect and non-blood based kinship ties like the one between the father-in-law and the son-law.
The porters are intensely uncomfortable with the nomenclature of the DTIDCL because it has made their already fragile jobs seem even more tenuous – the ‘Limited’ part of the DTIDCL lends the authority the aura of a company. While the porters always wanted their jobs to more secure, – they have, for instance craved salaried payment and pensions – they never had to regard themselves as contractual employees. Porter after porter testified to the fear that they were now rendered ad hoc employees of a ‘limited-wallah adhikari’.
The new regime has also made timely medical tests compulsory and has made the renewal of ID cards once in 5 years contingent on MBBS-certified medical certificates. Ageing porters and those recovering from a debilitating fall and sickness are particularly at risk of losing their licenses. Some porters asked indignantly, ‘shouldn’t other blue-collared government employees like sweepers, clerks, postmen be held up to the same mandate of medical fitness? Why should our licenses alone be held ransom to our state of health?’ When the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan kicked off in ISBT, the porters uncomplainingly pitched in. But they couldn’t help wondering if they were government employees in the sense that this Abhiyan rendered them, why could they not be employees in the more privileged sense of the term involving pensions and concessions?
In recent years, ISBT has got a swank new look with regulated entrances, elevators and escalators, clean toilets and Metro-style X-ray machines, but this has not entailed an improvement of their own living conditions. The porters still stay at a decrepit vishram griha or a dorm-like single rest room with battered lockers and poorly functional toilets. It is only after several years of ceaseless negotiations that there has been some progress in this regard recently – a plan for an expanded rest room as well as its refurbishment is in place; the plan has been very slow to get off the ground. The rest room did not simply serve as a material comfort in that it buffered the porters from the extremities of the infamous Delhi weather. The porters mobilized the restroom into an official Delhi address by listing it as their place of residence in the license. If one were to leave out the few Delhi-based residents, this license served as the only proof of their stay in Delhi for most other migrant porters. Of the 70 porters I interviewed, only 16 porters resided in Delhi and possessed IDs and addresses pertaining to the city. One porter stayed at a mosque in Old Delhi and lacked any proof other than the license to substantiate this. Voter identity cards and ration cards, for the rest of the migrant porters could only be issued by authorities in their home states. The union, through the admirable help of an NGO sought repeatedly to get voter identity cards and ration cards issued to some migrant porters on the strength of their bus adda rest room address. Briefly, the Food and Supplies office and the Voters’ Registration Centre obliged them – but the few cards that were issued were rapidly cancelled owing to political interference from a few MLAs. In a classic story of diminishing electoral returns, these MLAs decided they would hinder the porters’ chances of getting these documents by raising objections to the porters’ lack of legitimate Delhi-based residence proof (One NGO’s take on this has been that Mission Convergence which privileged NGOs and Gender Resource Centres in aiding urban poor enumeration may have made MLA recommendation letters less indispensable to the process). Through these objections, they were able to get such cards cancelled. As such, those porters who lack IDs in their own home states have not had luck getting them in Delhi either. Many of the porters believed that the Aadhaar could mitigate this inexorable quest for an assorted basket of IDs that would enable access to different spatial (rural/urban) networks. Those of them who did acquire Aadhaars from their home states found that Delhi’s banks and welfare schemes required city-specific proofs – the porters’ ability to open an account in the city and to access welfare schemes depended on the ability to produce such proofs over and above the Aadhaar.
The everyday politics of the porters’ petition for Aadhaar
It is important to note that the porters have not endorsed the Aadhaar in the way it has unfolded. Far from it, they were highly critical of aspects such as the insistence on address and ID proof. Their views on biometrics are more ambivalent, with many not being clear as to its purpose in the first place. The emphasis on proofs angered them – what is so unique about this project if it replicated the same burdens to produce proof of address and identity, they often asked me. However, they could not cut themselves off from an Aadhaar especially if it resulted in a city-specific ID and if it was mandatory for enjoying coherent welfare benefits.
This article cannot hope to give an empirical and historical outline of what the Aadhaar has entailed. This is an enterprise that is being comprehensively undertaken in various academic circles – entire M.Phils and PhDs are being written around the UID project both in India and abroad even as we speak. Suffice it to say here that this project has entailed the collection of demographic and biometric information stored in a central database, and the creation of a unique 12 digit identity number that links to it. Bank accounts on the one hand and government schemes like direct cash transfer benefits, pensions, scholarships, rations, employment guarantee wages are integrated with the number. Unlike the National Population Register, Aadhaar is not mandatory across the Indian states which are free to distance themselves from this identification exercise. But in states where Aadhaar was approved, there have been feverish enrollment drives – the impetus to such drives was supplied by the linkage of the Aadhaar with marriage certificates, PAN cards, LPG gas connections but also ration cards and bank accounts. Delhi showed an exceptional enthusiasm, with Sheila Dikshit’s government spreading the Aadhaar net wide in terms of linkage – a few outstanding examples are Annashree Yojana, free gas connections and the Food Security Scheme in the welfare scheme bracket and marriage registration, property registration, income certificates, caste certificates in the certification bracket.
Of all the porters I interviewed though, not a single one had benefited from any of the welfare schemes linked to the Aadhaar, and barely a handful had heard of them. The more recent Jan Dhan Yojana promised them certain financial benefits: but considering that an Aadhaar was neither mandatory to open an account nor to lay claim to the insurance entitlement, why bother? What then prompted them to get an Aadhaar ID? To understand this demand, we need to grasp the everyday politics of the porters’ struggles around identification. The porters’ documentary predicament reminded them of their liminal presence in the city – they had to renew their porter licenses after getting medical tests that exposed them to job termination. Besides, these licenses were not even properly state government-issued: the limited wallah card underlined for them the ad hoc nature of their jobs. If earlier, they had little luck approaching banks with just their porters’ licenses, now they felt even less sure. The porters also can’t help regarding with consternation all the talk about modernization of the ISBTs that the Delhi Transport Department as well as the Union Transport Minister, Nitin Gadkari have recently indulged in. After he read the newspaper report in which Gadkari promises airport-style ISBTs, one of the union office-bearers immediately asked me, ‘trolleys are more consistent with a posh ISBT than porters, no?’. These concerns only emphasized the patent unreliability of the porters’ license as an urban ID and intensified their search for other cards that could account for their presence in the city.
The porter’s union was a beehive of always ongoing paperwork. Apart from handling new applications, a record was meticulously maintained by the office-bearers with each page serving as a paper trail of the porter’s ID history. If the first part of the page contained the porter’s family predecessor (who he inherited his ID from), the latter part contained details of the present incumbent. The details for both the previous and the incumbent porter were the same: the photo, name, father’s name, temporary address, permanent address and age, signature or thumb print. Every time the porter took leave, he had to leave his badge (a metallic token bearing a number) behind along with a leave letter. These various documents carried immense evidentiary value – the leave letter supported by the register and the badge recorded the days of his absence thus helping many a porter fend off criminal charges when he was falsely accused of some crime back in his village. The fear of criminal taint over and above police harassment was one that drove porters to crave a document like the Aadhaar. Back in the bus adda, every time a bag or suit case went missing, the porters were routinely hauled up. Almost all the porters I spoke to believed that the fingerprints captured in the Aadhaar were there to apprehend criminals and rescue blameless people like themselves from criminal liability. On every field trip I made to ISBT, Kashmere Gate, the entry to the terminal was heavily policed with a bomb detection squad van parked outside. This routinized everyday fear which is a direct consequence of the nature of their work is a crucial link to understanding the porters’ desire for a biometric ID. In a way, the appeal of the Aadhaar would perhaps be greatly diminished if this deeply internalized fear were to be first addressed.
Migrant porters who inhabited two worlds – one an agricultural/rural world and the other an urban, unionized yet unorganized urban labour world – craved a documented presence that was wide-ranging. This may be a very obvious assumption to make – and their porter IDs should have normally sufficed to account for their presence in this other urban world. But strangely enough, this ID has worked for them as a government ID only within the commercial confines of the bus adda. The Aadhaar computer operators have categorically refused to accept a legitimately and rather comprehensively issued ID from a government authority. (I say legitimately and comprehensively issued ID because the application for a bus porter’s license which was submitted earlier to the Delhi Transport Department and now to the DTIDCL, not unlike the railway porter’s license, requires all manner of proofs, statements and affidavits ranging from proof of identity and proof of address documents to police verification certificates, medical certificates, NoCs from competing sons and even daughters). Why do these cards then fail to be ‘pukka’ as the common usage goes? The official line on this is multifold but I will construe it in two senses of the coolie license’s claim to be an address proof and an ID proof: (a) the bus adda is a government undertaking, the rest room is not a private residential space and such an address would lack legitimacy. (b) the porters are not government employees, hence this cannot be a proof of ID either in the strict sense of the term. Just as they are not entitled to salaries and pensions, they lack any prima facie claim to government IDs either. This has left the porters desperate for an ID outside their porter network in the city, and the Aadhaar has eluded them for the same reasons that they have desired it. If they saw the Aadhaar as a card that would override the need to procure other cards, they needed to show proof that they were certified to begin with. And certified in an all too conventional sense – an address and ID proof were necessary.
Getting the Aadhaar
A cursory look at the application form would suggest that getting the Aadhaar is superlatively simple: observe the impressive list of 18 Proof of Identity documents and 33 Proof of Address documents that an applicant can pick from. Visiting the enrollment camps suggested otherwise.
Even if the ID was issued technically by a government undertaking, the address in the ID card could not be that of a government undertaking. A certificate of identity with a photo issued by a gazetted officer such as a doctor with an MBBS degree may suffice as Proof of Identity (PoI). That would still require the applicant to submit Proof of Address (PoA) (and we saw how PoA was the trickier one for the porters). An MLA could provide a certificate of address but computer operators stopped taking such certificates from applicants after the Delhi Assembly went into a state of limbo since the dissolution of the AAP government. At a certain point in time early on in the UID’s life, an introducer could by giving his own fingerprints testify to the identity and the address of an applicant. This provision is all but absent now in the application process: by the UID authorities’ own admission but also by the testimony of various NGO figures, this has not been feasible because introducers don’t want to be legally liable in compromising criminal situations involving the person (often homeless person) who lacked the means to demonstrate his identity or address.
Mission Convergence was a flagship program introduced by the Sheila Dikshit government to provide what was termed a single window to fragmented government schemes strewn across various government departments. This program considered its purpose to be the ‘convergence’ of various social service schemes. It went about doing this through intermediaries such as Gender Resource Centres, Suvidha Kendras and District Resource Centres. But before scheme-related awareness could be disseminated and beneficiaries identified, it was considered necessary to first carry out massive surveys of poor households both of those staying in slum and resettlement colonies, and the homeless. This program also sought to (a) enable the homeless to acquire Aadhaars and (b) facilitate the integration of its various schemes with the Aadhaar. In the early days of the Aadhaar’s life, the ‘introducer’ facility – where an NGO representative or a householder provides her own address details and fingerprints to vouch for the undocumented, often homeless, person – within the Aadhaar was invoked to ease the entry of the homeless into the central database. A few NGO figures have been rightly been critical of the very elite premise behind the introducer. The representative of one such NGO which was at one point associated with Mission Convergence, asked, ‘who are we to introduce the undocumented? Why must an undocumented person become more trustworthy just because an NGO or a middle-class employer vouches for her/him? Does (s)he not have her own identity, her own dignity?’ Such an ID bearing another’s address denudes the bearer of any real sense of being documented. This particular NGO has, in its own efforts tried to get voter identity cards and ration cards issued to the porters and other homeless persons in Delhi; in doing so, it has sought painstakingly to ensure that these documents bear their own address even if such an address consists only of a street name.
Of the 70 porters I interviewed, 32 porters did manage to get their Aadhaar made. Only a couple of them said they got their Aadhaars made at the enrollment camp set up in Kashmere Gate. All of them were able to do so because they had traditional documents like voter identity cards and bank accounts. Of the 168 porters working at Kashmere Gate, at present, roughly 60 porters are in need of getting their Aadhaars made (since I could not interview all of them, I cannot vouch for this number). A few of them had the proofs required to submit to the Aadhaar authorities but their timing was never right; they were visiting their villages when the enrollment camps took place in Delhi or vice versa. Others were present when these camps took place but had left their ID proofs at home. At some point, computer operators in Delhi were given explicit instructions not to accept forms of homeless and other urban poor persons who approached them through the introducer. When existing IDs like the porter license were not valid, and traditional proofs like PAN card, bank accounts, voter identity cards, ration cards not available, the process was far from being self-evidently simple. Perhaps stranger than everything else was the fact that there was an enrollment camp for a couple of days held at the ISBT porters’ union office that failed to resolve any of the problems. The computer operators left abruptly when there was a power breakdown without even issuing receipts for those who had their biometrics captured. Only a few were issued Aadhaars to start with – in the wake of repeated phone calls to the operator and petitions to the UID authorities at various levels, some receipts were issued (presumably to those whose biometrics had already been captured). But none of these petitions have prompted the Aadhaar authorities to return to set up another camp, one that they could at least see through.
Aadhaar and government schemes
Tragically, while some migrant porters from Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh managed to get their Aadhaars made, neither they nor the Delhi-based porters were able to lay claim to any government schemes linked to the number. Of all the porters I spoke with not even a single one of them had heard of the Annashree Yojana (a direct benefit transfer scheme) under the Sheila Dikshit government, much less applied for it. This includes the porters who did possess the Aadhaar numbers. For the fleeting time that the scheme was introduced, the meagre 600 rupees per month it entitled beneficiaries to was meant only for those who could prove they were residents of Delhi for the last three years, who lacked BPL/Antyodaya Anna Yojana ration cards and who earned less than a lakh a year. A food official from the Food and Supply Department added that the possession of even an APL ration card would disqualify the applicant in this scheme. While the databases of the Food and Supplies Department would be relied on to determine if an applicant had an active ration card or not, the scheme did seem to allow for some discretion in determining eligible beneficiaries. How can an applicant demonstrate the non-possession of a card, I asked him. He nodded very sadly and said, ‘perhaps if you have an old card which has been cancelled?’ The few porters who resided in Delhi possessing the Aadhaar would have possibly failed to demonstrate their non-possession of ration cards. The other migrant porters were of course, not eligible, owing to the Delhi clause – for even though they had resided in Delhi for a long duration of time, their cards would have probably not satisfied the definition of a legitimate government-issued residence proof. All this is hypothetical, of course, as the porters barely knew about the scheme. But for those who possessed them, Aadhaars seemed meaningless if they did not result in coherent and meaningful linkages with government benefits.
In contrast, the national scheme of Jan Dhan Yojana – which bears linkages with Aadhaar – with its striking allures of a zero balance bank account, an accident insurance and life insurance was one that almost every porter had heard of. While opening an account under the JDY was possible even without an Aadhaar or for that matter any government-issued ID, such accounts would be ‘small’ with very limited benefits vis-à-vis credit, balance, aggregate withdrawals. To make a bank overdraft, for example, the Aadhaar would be mandatory. And for such an account to stay functional, proof would have to be produced within 12 months of opening it.
Those scholars studying the Aadhaar-related experiences of marginal subjects have remarked on the various definitions of identity that social welfare projects invariably hinge on. Ursula Rao, for instance, suggests that the reason banks are not satisfied with Aadhaar when they are carrying out transactions with the homeless poor is because their notions of identity encompass not simply the physical trace of the individual but also social standing and trust. While my own interviews reinforced this observation, I was struck by something else as well, namely the bank officials’ hardheaded interpretations of financial inclusion. One SBI bank official in Delhi, who requested strict anonymity, informed me that the RuPay debit card which alone entitles the JDY beneficiary to claim such insurance is very unlikely to be issued to what he termed a ‘low-cadre and low-profile’ clientele like the porters (who are capable of maintaining only basic and small accounts). The scheme was introduced for two purposes, he insists. One was to foster the habit of ‘savings and thrift’ among the poor and to train them to keep their accounts alive and the second, to prevent the duplication of account-based identities for the purpose of monitoring beneficiaries of government-issued entitlements. Though they cannot disallow it, bank officials governed by the RBI norms related to the scheme have not really favoured giving cheque books under this scheme (these can be secured at a cost of 100 rupees for a book; the first 20 leaves are free. The rate seems to be variable across banks). For doing so would only encourage account-holders to enter transactions with third parties like the BYPL and the LIC which would make it too messy; this scheme was meant for limited personal transactions. So, RBI norms state that that an applicant under JDY should not possess any alternative account (and if she did, then her existing account could be linked to the scheme). The JDY’s features seen in conjunction with these norms are designed to discourage account-holders from using their accounts for anything other than creating savings and receiving government benefits. Financial inclusion must be construed to mean enabling the entry of the poor into the banking system – it did not necessarily imply the systematic provision of financial benefits, such as insurance on a social welfare basis or the creation of incentives for personal banking. It could well be that the insurance entitlements are a smokescreen of a more narrowly defined scheme. So, even though the porters were enticed enough by the JDY to acquire the Aadhaar, union office-bearers were able to disabuse them, to a certain extent, of the exaggerated possibilities of this scheme.
Conclusion
Leaving aside for a moment questions of what enumeration entails in welfare terms, one can argue that a genuine concern in enumerating the poor in India has to be manifest in a paradoxical sense – such a drive has to waive the emphasis on stable and legitimate address proofs and yet be able to create a spatially specific proof. And such an ID should be that of the bearer in every coherent sense of the term (bestowing to the bearer her own address and demographic details and if at all needed, her own fingerprints). Owing to its flawed introducer scheme, and its mulish insistence on specific forms of PoA and PoI, the Aadhaar may not have lived up to these expectations. But one cannot ignore what the Aadhaar means in a welfare sense either. If the porters have insisted on their right to acquire the Aadhaar, they have simultaneously been critical of its various claims of number portability, universal welfare support, financial inclusion, etc. Their immediate political context of struggles around bus licenses, tokens, applications for transfer of licenses, medical fitness certificates is relevant to their wish to acquire a mobile but city-specific ID. Though the Aadhaar belies such an expectation, the porters still seek it because they do not wish to be tricked out of possible financial benefits that accrue to the unimaginatively defined – in terms of income levels, possession of BPL cards – poor community in India. But they also recognize that it is their ever-present fears coloured by the heavily policed nature of their work that produces a collective desire for a biometric ID. It is not merely a new ID that they crave. It is quite specifically an ID that contains their physical fingerprints which, they believe, will bail them out in a criminal situation where they may be held culpable. Their organized yet unorganized statuses, defined by the tentativeness of their jobs and the fragility of their porters’ licenses, are also illuminating of their petition for the Aadhaar. In explaining why they thus must wear metallic tokens bearing numbers – not unlike Amitabh Bachchan and Govinda in films that have framed the coolie in unforgettable Bollywood idiom – one porter put it like this, ‘number wallah coolie chor nahin ho sakta’ (the number-bearing coolie cannot be a criminal) – this perhaps more than anything else explains why the bus porters want the Aadhaar but also recognize that this desire is politically fraught. It is not a cultural or political void that produces desires and anxieties around processes of marking, classifying, codifying and enumerating persons. The political prisms through which the porters perceive and relate to the Aadhaar cannot be isolated from a larger migrant and marginal experience of identification. And within a city like Delhi, such a marginal position mandates not so much a portable form of identification as a spatially enabling one.
Below I reproduce an open letter from the porters of ISBT to the UIDAI, where they express their unhappiness at the difficulty they have faced in acquiring Aadhaars. The porters request the setting up of an enrollment camp at the earliest to help them gain access to a document that they believe may affect them adversely in its absence.
To
The Director General, Unique Identification Authority of India, Government of India
Dear Sir,
We work as bus coolies at ISBT, Kashmere Gate, and our union is registered under the Societies’ Registration Act, 1860. We are licensed workers (though not government employees) first under the DDA, then under the Delhi Transport Department and now under the Delhi Transport Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited. Your office was kind enough to set up an Aadhaar enrollment camp for three days at our porters’ union office at ISBT in the month of May 2014. Unfortunately, owing to a voltage problem, the computer that the operator was using broke down. Many porters had turned up for their Aadhaar enrollment. However, only a few of them managed to get their receipts issued before this happened. The operator promised to meet us the very next day and deliver the receipts of those whose biometrics had been captured but he failed to turn up. Repeated phone calls to the operator yielded some result. He appeared one day after a couple of months to give us the Aadhaar receipts of some porters who had submitted their demographic and biometric information. But, there are still many porters who wish to get their Aadhaars made. Some of them showed up at the camp but failed to produce documents that could work as Proof of Address (PoA) and Proof of Identity (PoI) at the time, but are now in a position to do so. Others were not present when the camp was held – being seasonal farmers, many of us have to flit between our homes and fields in our villages, and our place of work at ISBT. We petitioned your office both directly and indirectly, requesting you to hold another camp. We believe that we have made our case known to you at various levels – the Deputy Director General, one of the Director Generals as well as the computer operator who came to ISBT have all been informed of our need and demand for universal coverage.
Our requests:
- An Aadhaar enrollment camp must be set up at the earliest in ISBT. We should be informed a week in advance, so that we can communicate this to all our coolie brothers both in the city and at their homes away from Delhi. This way, all of us who want to be enrolled can be present on the day. This will also give us the time to get our documents in order.
- A few of us lack all government IDs except for the porter’s ID card issued earlier by the Delhi Transport Department and now by the DTIDCL. But since this card cites our permanent address and is issued by a government authority, it should be recognized as proof (especially if the porter in question lacks all other ID). Your own Aadhaar form lists government photo ID card/service photo ID card of a public sector undertaking as acceptable PoI and PoA. Since the DTIDCL qualifies as a fully government-owned (Government of NCT Delhi) private enterprise, the photo IDs issued by them should count as proof of address and proof of identity. (In the past, the computer operators have rejected these cards, we fail to see why they cannot be recognized. After all, at the time of joining, each of us porters had to produce various proofs and undergo elaborate police verification of our address in order to get these cards made by the transport authorities). We fail to see why they cannot be accepted as legitimate ID for purposes of enrolment.
We believe that you wish to increase the number of those enrolled under the Aadhaar on a daily basis. We understand that your record of the present Aadhaar enrollees has crossed 1 crore just in Delhi and 63 crore all over India. Our numbers don’t match up to this record (we believe that 60 porters still wish to be enrolled) – you will only be able to increase your figures marginally if you set up another camp for us. But we also wish to believe that you are interested in addressing marginality and poverty per se: and surely, numbers alone are not going to add up to this goal.
We wish you all the best in your endeavours,
Best regards and signed by
Representatives of the Porters Union,
Maharana Pratap Inter-State Bus Terminal, Kashmere Gate, Delhi 110006.
Name Designation
Lashmi Narayan Bagri President
Chhajuram General Secretary
Shyamlal Vice-President
Dhanpal Vice-President
Rajkumar Joint Secretary
Aneesh Office Secretary
Atmaram Treasurer
Tarangini Sriraman teaches at a college in Delhi University. The fieldwork for this article was undertaken during her term as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the Social Sciences and Humanities (previously called the Centre de Sciences Humaines).
