India is scanning the fingerprints, eyes and faces of its 1.3 billion residents

In other parts of the world, the government is using technology as a new tool for monitoring citizens. Many countries, including the United Kingdom, have also deployed closed-circuit probes to monitor the population. The Indian project not only collects the biometric information of the residents on a large scale, but also tries to associate it with everything, including traffic tickets, bank accounts, pensions, and even schoolchild nutrition meals.

Jacqueline Bhabha,  a professor and research director of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, said that “No one has approached that scale and that ambition. It has been hailed, and justifiably so, as an extraordinary triumph to get everyone registered.”