business or real estate.
Programmes of this sort are not for the needy, and they show that hallowed
principles sanctioned by law—territory, descent—need not get in the way of big
plans when you get the equation right. Selling and buying forged passports is
another line of business, which, because of the value disparity of different
citizenships, is quite lucrative for the entrepreneurs, although falsifying has
become a high-tech operation.
It was only in the early 20th century that passports assumed their present-day
functions as proof of identity and means of immigration control. As a result, the
words ‘identity’ and ‘identify’ have acquired a bureaucratic savour. The
evolution of passports and other ID documents well illustrates the progress of the
all-encompassing state that assigns a place to every citizen and keeps the alien
out. In the course of the 20th century, this became a preoccupation of the welfare
state, so much so that passports that once were simple sheets of paper certifying
their bearer’s name and address, perhaps mentioning eye colour and height, with
an official stamp or seal, have become as difficult to counterfeit as legal tender.
Because so much depends not just on being who you are, but on being able to
prove it, the technology of forgery-proofing identity documents has become very
sophisticated. Nowadays ID documents include security features such as
biometric photographs, bidimensional barcodes, microchips with fingerprints
and iris patterns, holograms, and watermarks.
Identity cards (also identification cards) serve the purpose to unequivocally
identify the individual citizen and to protect this citizenship against interlopers.
Many people resent the idea of making identity cards compulsory as violating
individual privacy, but the majority of countries have done so, and the grid with
which individuals are identified and classified is becoming finer and finer.
Travelling legally across international borders without an identity card or
passport has become all but impossible, while most states continue to refine their
tools for registering citizens, assigning them a digital identity that can be verified
with the scan of a fingerprint or an iris photograph. In one of the biggest projects
of this sort ever, India has recorded these data of all 1.3 billion Indian citizens.
This identity programme, called Aadhaar, or ‘foundation’, is designed to bring
digital identity proof to the poor and facilitate access to welfare benefits, while at
the same time reducing waste by eliminating ‘ghosts’ and duplicates. A digital
identity thus will become indispensable in India, as doubtless it will elsewhere.