Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the effect of India's new biometric-based ID on the lives of poor migrants to the industrial township of Noida. It asks whether access to housing and employment opportunities have been eased up by the UID in this region and what emergent forms of citizenship it is enabling.

Paper long abstract:

This paper traces the process whereby new biometric-based IDs called UIDs are administered by the state as well as utilised by poor migrants living in a slum in Noida outside Delhi. The UID pegs its utility on its technological sophistication, which will (the project claims) enable a perfect and foolproof form of identification of individuals. My paper will explore this claim empirically on the basis of fieldwork conducted in Noida. In particular, I will study the effects of the ID in gaining access to housing and employment opportunities for this traditionally difficult-to-identify community of mobile migrants to urban areas. My central concern is to examine what an ethnography of the UID project can tell us about the re-imagination and reconfiguration of statecraft in contemporary India as well as what emergent forms of citizenship it can illuminate.