Citizen's gain? Institutional logics and the making of India's aadhaar identity project

Abstract

The process of establishing citizen identity, especially for the stated purpose of targeting delivery of citizen centric services, is gradually shifting gears to become more technology-dependent. The interplay of the social, political, legal and technological aspects makes such initiatives intensely complex. Actors seeking to pursue their own interests in the context of the project can be expected to simplify and frame their characteristics in particular ways by means of theorization. We investigate the evolution of India's identity project - Aadhaar, using events, perceptions and public debates in an attempt to deduce the institutional logics that provide the foundations for such theorization. Two competing institutional logics - service provision logic and access restriction logic coexisted as the building blocks for the agentic theorization of Aadhaar. Through the transposition of dominance of the latter, we glimpse the contours of a debate on the technology-mediated relationship between the Citizen and the State. © International Conference on Information Systems 2018, ICIS 2018.All rights reserved.