e-Topia: China, India and Biometric Borders

e-Topia refers to the place of the digital in visions of the future. The e-Topia project studies the digital as political, examining how India and China - the two most populous countries in the world - harness "smart" technologies to create new economic opportunities, more efficient governance, and more reliable and transparent welfare provision. The project examines policymaking on biometrics, e-governance, the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber sovereignty in India and China. It also investigates new forms of digital and cyber in/security due to increasing reliance on public-private partnerships, corporate software providers and data storage and processing faciltities, and tensions between the need for global standards and cyber sovereignty concerns. The project highlights the potential of biometric data registration to be coupled with ID scanning across sovereign territories, conflating border control, surveillance and digital governance. Travel between India and China is on the rise, although their high-altitude border remains unresolved. As the Asian contribution to the global smart technology market continues to grow, the relationship between India and China is increasingly dependent on the compatibility of their digitalization efforts. A key contribution of e-Topia is to study new forms of cyber-governance and its employment in the delivery of services, surveillance and border control in both the Asian giants, examining the trade-offs of e-governance solutions such as vulnerability to digital crime, ethnic profiling, monitoring, surveillance, and loss of privacy. With the introduction of biometric data registration and digital identification programs in a growing number of countries across the world, concerns about cyber insecurity and digital vulnerability are mounting. e-Topia will generate new knowledge on the e-governance and IoT strategies of India and China, their digital relations, and their common "e-Topian" dreams.