Algorithmic Citizenship

**Inika Dular

Introduction

Citizenship is the cornerstone of every constitutional democracy. It comprises moral support for justice, freedom, and dignity, in addition to a legal standing within the state. In India, the idea has evolved into a constitutional guarantee that the State will uphold everyone’s right to justice and dignity, regardless of their socio-economic standing.  However, the digital turn’s technological avenues are gradually displacing the promise. This change is best exemplified by the Aadhaar project, the largest fingerprint and iris scan identification system in the world. Initially regarded as a way to gain social recognition and redistribution, it has since evolved into the essential framework of the State, linking voters and bank accounts alike. The State’s reliance on technology to define and allocate rights marks this change— citizenship, which was previously determined by a constitutional recognition, is now determined by an algorithmic verdict.

This piece argues for India to develop a doctrine of ‘algorithmic due process’ rooted in constitutional principles of transparency, fairness, and accountability to ensure that digital governance systems respect rather than erode fundamental rights. This piece argues that algorithmic governance — the use of automated decision-making systems and data-driven technologies by the State to allocate rights and services — has changed India’s understanding of constitutional citizenship. This essay first analyses this shift using India’s experience with Aadhaar. It then contextualises this transition through comparisons to developments in Kenya and the EU, and, consequently, suggests that the Indian Constitution be updated to ensure digital inclusion, algorithmic transparency, and fair trials in the era of data-driven governance.

Constitutional Citizenship and the Indian Framework

In India, citizenship is both a moral and a legal concept. Part II of the Constitution outlines the definition of citizenship, and Part III discusses fundamental rights, illustrating what citizenship means in practice. The framers envisioned a relationship between the State and the individual moral principles found in the Constitution rather than administrative authority.

This concept has been upheld by the Supreme Court (SC) on numerous occasions. In the landmark case of Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, the Court included dignity and equality in the list of the basic structure of the Constitution. In Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, the Court transformed the idea of “procedure established by law” into a prerequisite of fairness and reasonableness, thus marking the inception of substantive due process in India. These decisions accentuated that rights emanate not from the State’s generosity but from the Constitution’s acknowledgement of inherent human dignity.

If the State demands algorithmic proof of identity to access welfare, food, or healthcare, it fundamentally alters the citizen-State relationship. The constitutional guarantee of dignity is subjected to machine recognition. Legal citizenship exists only on paper, while lived citizenship is digital and conditional. Aadhaar represents a fundamental departure from this constitutional vision.

Aadhaar and the Rise of Algorithmic Citizenship

The Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits, and Services) Act of 2016 established the Aadhaar system. It aimed to assign each citizen a unique twelve-digit ID number that would be linked to their biometric and demographic data. In principle, the Aadhaar system has moved from being a welfare initiative to being the backbone of the Indian governance system. Today, State services such as banking, pensions, education, and even mobile connections rely on Aadhaar. The escalation of this is not only an indication of the State’s power over its people through data instead of debates, but also a transformation in the way citizens are recognised.

Aadhaar promised inclusion of the underprivileged by directing welfare to the needy. Unfortunately, the initiative that was meant to help the excluded has instead made them even more excluded. Due to the authentication failures caused by torn fingerprints, poor connectivity, and database issues, citizens have lost access to the welfare benefits that are rightfully theirs. Between 2017 and 2019, many deaths from starvation in Jharkhand were reported by credible media outlets after biometric identity verification failures denied rations to vulnerable citizens. For those who barely manage to survive, such technological inaccuracies are not just minor challenges, but a violation of their constitutional rights protected through Article 21’s assurance of life and dignity. These failures reveal a deeper constitutional problem: when algorithms control access to rights, technical errors become violations of Article 21.

The loss of privacy and autonomy is equally concerning. The SC in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India proclaimed privacy as a fundamental right, but at the same time, the Aadhaar system is turning surveillance into a new era by integrating all data. The merging and sharing of citizens’ biometric and demographic records among various departments gives the State an effortless way to monitor their movements. The Court allowed the continuation of the project but declared those parts enabling the private use as unconstitutional, acknowledging the danger of profiling. Yet, the government has subsequently relaxed these restrictions to the extent that, in its own policies, it has referred to sharing Aadhaar-linked data between public and private sectors.

This transformation has led to what scholars name “algorithmic citizenship,” which is a condition where one’s legal status and access to rights depend on successful authentication by automated systems rather than constitutional guarantees. Are the rights and the associated status coming as a flow through the data infrastructures? Citizenship, now, is not that one is born a citizen; rather, it is a technical condition contingent on successful engagement with an algorithm. Hannah Arendt’s “the right to have rights” applied to citizenship implies that this is now mediated by code. Such a situation gives birth to a type of digital constitutionalism — the framework for adapting constitutional principles to govern digital technologies and data-driven governance — in which the language of rights is displaced by the logic of efficiency.

Algorithmic citizenship eliminates responsibility. When exclusion occurs, no single authority bears responsibility; officials blame the software, while the system blames the user. Still, the constitutional theory stipulates that the State cannot delegate its duties to technology. The obligation to secure equality, dignity, and due process is a government’s burden, regardless of the medium through which it acts. The judiciary has traditionally ruled that whatever is impermissible for the State to do directly cannot be allowed to happen indirectly. Thus, the empowering of opaque technologies to interact with rights without any recourse makes the State practically outsource constitutional accountability. This accountability deficit is precisely what the doctrine of algorithmic due process must address.

Digital Exclusion as a Constitutional Injury

Digital exclusion in India has not happened by chance, nor is it merely a technical issue. It shows the country’s deeply rooted social divisions. People facing the biggest problems due to the failure of biometric authentication are manual labourers, Dalits, Adivasis, migrants, and the elderly, who have been politically voiceless and deprived of welfare throughout history. In this scenario, technology does not eliminate discrimination; it merely changes the medium of discrimination to a digital one.

Digital exclusion is a violation of Article 14’s right to equality and Article 21’s right to life and dignity. Article 14 prohibits arbitrary actions, and the SC in E.P. Royappa v. State of Tamil Nadu famously opined that “equality and arbitrariness are sworn enemies.” So, when the State uses non-transparent algorithms that unpredictably deny the benefit or acknowledgement, the department embeds arbitrariness in the very construction of the system. What the citizen then experiences from the State is not based on the constitutional values but on the probabilistic outcomes decided by the code.

Such arbitrariness has a great bearing on the right to life as per Article 21. In Francis Coralie Mullin v. The Administrator, Union Territory of Delhi, the Court held “life” to be not mere “animal existence” but a life with a difference. Should the rights to food, housing, and livelihood be considered to flow from this guarantee, as was later confirmed in Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, then their denial through technological means would not be a case of mere administrative error but rather a loss of constitutional right. When the biometric mismatch leads to either hunger or humiliation, the promise of constitutional dignity collapses into a database error.

The doctrine of substantive equality, a legal principle that focuses on achieving fair outcomes for structurally disadvantaged groups by recognising that treating everyone identically can often perpetuate existing social inequalities, validly supports the argument. In Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India and Shayara Bano v. Union of India, the term equality is interpreted differently, by interpreting the non-formal aspect of equality and taking into account the structurally disadvantaged position of certain groups in society. Consequently, the same thought process leads to the conclusion that a digital system, which unintentionally yet systematically excludes certain social groups, violates Article 14. Absence of human oversight in these systems creates conditions of inequality hidden under the mask of neutrality.

Digital exclusion brings to the fore the question of procedural fairness, a fundamental principle of constitutional governance. The Court, in the case of Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, held that “the procedure prescribed by law must be fair, just and reasonable, not fanciful, oppressive or arbitrary.” However, the Aadhaar system frequently operates in obscurity. A citizen denied access to a ration or pension because of “authentication failure” usually is not informed of the reason, is not allowed to respond, and is not provided with appeal avenues. Officials are seldom held accountable, and algorithms are not subjected to scrutiny. The lack of interaction turns constitutional rights into issues of the privilege granted by the nebulous operation of technology.

The absence of fairness already transcends the technical dimension and reaches the metaphorical one. In a constitutional democracy, the government acknowledges citizens as moral agents eligible to engage with the State. However, when the government seeks the aid of an automated interface that is devoid of empathetic understanding or reasoning, it in effect annihilates that ethical association.

Thus, it is indispensable to bill the digital exclusion in terms of constitutional ethics, as was also mentioned in the case of the Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala. Even when the majority or bureaucracy would prefer otherwise, constitutional morality requires that the government always stand up for human rights, empathy, and inclusivity.

Therefore, the effects of technological exclusion extend beyond socioeconomic circumstances. Equality, dignity, and procedural justice are at the heart of the Indian Republic. A constitutional digital governance system must first acknowledge that a citizen’s right to welfare cannot be superseded by a technological intervention.

Comparative Perspectives: Kenya and the European Union

The experiences of Kenya and the European Union demonstrate that constitutional frameworks can successfully govern algorithmic systems to some extent, providing models for the algorithmic due process doctrine proposed here. 

The Kenyan government launched the Huduma Namba project, a national digital identity scheme similar to Aadhaar, in the hopes of efficient welfare delivery. However, civil society organisations brought the matter to the High Court, arguing that it violated the fundamental right of privacy and equality. In 2020, the court halted the project until a suitable framework for data protection was established. Kenya’s example illustrates a key principle for algorithmic due process, that the digital identification systems cannot operate without robust data protection frameworks, which is a gap India must address.

Interestingly, individuals have the ability to challenge automated decisions in addition to having the ability to access, edit, and remove their data through the General Data Protection Regulation and the European Union’s (EU) eIDAS Regulation. It requires human oversight and transparency. According to the EU’s stance, if accountability is institutionalised, digital identity can be developed alongside the broad protections of the constitution.

The EU model provides three concrete elements for India’s algorithmic due process framework: the right to challenge automated decisions (appealing to Article 21’s fairness requirement), mandatory human oversight (addressing the accountability deficit identified above), and transparency obligations (fulfilling Article 19’s right to information).

The Indian Constitution has scope to incorporate such ideas, but it lacks a precise legal framework to back them up. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act provides a foundation for the concepts of consent and processing, but misses explicit safeguards against algorithmic discrimination. Thus, the comparative study reveals that it is not enough to enact laws but also to build a structure to counter algorithmic power.

Towards a Doctrine of Algorithmic Due Process

The discussion above reveals a constitutional crisis of algorithmic systems restructuring citizenship in ways that violate fundamental rights. Comparative experience demonstrates that legal frameworks can address this challenge. The Constitution is a living document. Just as Maneka Gandhi expanded Article 21 to become a source of basic fairness, the digital era will demand a similar transition — a model of due process in case of algorithms. This will mean that the State never uses automated decision-making systems for rights-implicating purposes without being governed by the principles of transparency, fairness, and accountability.

Firstly, transparency is a constitutional mandate. The State has to disclose the workings of its algorithms, including the data they collect, the criteria they apply, and the rationale behind their decisions. In the case of welfare and identity verification systems, individuals must be informed of the reasons for their authentication or denial. Transparency is a prerequisite for the creation of informed consent and accountability.

Secondly, explainability is a must. The algorithms should be such that their functioning can be interpreted and understood easily by both the users and the supervisors. Citizens should be informed of the reasons behind every decision, every failure, and every denial of benefits. This demand grows out of the right to information under Article 19(1)(a) and the procedural fairness aspect of Article 21. This responds to cases like the Jharkhand starvation deaths, where citizens had no way to understand why they were denied benefits.

Thirdly, a remedy must always be available. Individuals affected by algorithmic errors should have access to appeal mechanisms and time-bound rectification. The courts and the administrative authorities should make rules for handling algorithmic errors similar to those for administrative reviews. This fills the accountability vacuum that currently allows exclusion without recourse.

Algorithmic due process is not a creator of new rights but rather a facilitator of the existing ones into new terrain. It puts into practice the prohibition against arbitrariness as under Article 14 by enhancing the fairness in data-driven decision-making; it supports the life and dignity guaranteed under Article 21 by introducing technology as a means for welfare; and it secures the right to information conferred by Article 19 through mandatory disclosure. For instance, mandatory disclosure of algorithmic criteria (Article 19) would have prevented the opacity that led to Aadhaar’s exclusion failures. Appeal mechanisms (Article 21) would have saved lives in Jharkhand. Anti-discrimination auditing (Article 14) would detect the biases inherent in biometric authentication that disadvantage manual labourers.

The establishment of this system would further Indian constitutionalism in the direction of global human rights. The OECD Guidelines and the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act are based on human supervision, non-exclusivity, and transparency as the conditions for lawful algorithm use. India’s constitutional values—such as freedom, equality, and respect—would continue to hold sway over the code if these principles were acknowledged through legislative reform.

Ultimately, algorithmic due process is about reclaiming the power to define constitutionality. It asserts that it is the Constitution, not the algorithm, that sets the boundaries of State power. In every digital interaction between the citizen and the state, the presumption must remain that human rights precede machine efficiency.

Reclaiming Citizenship in the Digital Republic

India’s problem is not technological, but constitutional. The relationship between the State and the citizen has evolved through the advent of digital systems, creating dependency and exclusion in a new form. However, the Constitution, which is based on the vision of justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity, already gives the necessary tools to respond. The legislative, the judiciary, and civil society must come together to apply these moral principles to the digital realm.

Firstly, the courts ought to recognise digital inclusion as implied in the right to life and equality. Citizens excluded from welfare because of algorithmic lacunae should be considered an unconstitutional deprivation. Secondly, the Parliament must accordingly legislate protections for the citizens’ rights in governmental algorithmic systems in terms of transparency, supervision, and remedy. Thirdly, civic participation should extend from mere law-making recommendations to independent audits to ensure that the voices of the deprived are heard in the systems that control them.

Kenya and the EU demonstrate that judicial intervention (as in Huduma Namba) and legislative frameworks (as in GDPR and eIDAS) can successfully adapt constitutional principles to algorithmic governance- models India can adopt through the algorithmic due process framework proposed here.  For India, it is imperative to imbue its digital network with constitutional values by reinforcing Puttaswamy’s spirit within Aadhaar and similar infrastructures.

It is fair to conclude that the future of citizenship is contingent upon preserving the primacy of humans over the algorithm. The Indian Constitution has always been an individual’s shield against arbitrary authority. In a digital era, the rights that flow by virtue of constitutional citizenship must be upheld and dignified irrespective of the judgment passed by technology.

**Inika Dular is an undergraduate student at the Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Punjab. 

**Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily align with the views of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.