The Malkajgiri police commissionerate in Hyderabad calls its data-collection drive of domestic workers in the city as Mee Suraksha as your safety. However, it is worth asking, safety for whom, and secured through whose exposure? Over 63,000 domestic workers have now had their Aadhaar numbers, bank details, UPI IDs, phone types, social media handles, religion, nationality, and the precise GPS coordinates of their homes entered into a police-run database, ostensibly to prevent crime in the city's gated apartment complexes. The Commissioner insists this is voluntary and therefore unobjectionable. But from a critical lens, this can never be accepted as "voluntary" at face value, not when it is offered to people whose material survival depends on saying yes.
Consent under conditions of dispossession
Development studies have spent half a century unlearning the liberal fiction that a transaction between unequal parties is "free" simply because no gun is pointed at anyone's head. Domestic work in Indian cities is precarious, largely informal, overwhelmingly performed by migrant women from Telangana's districts, and from other parts of the country. It is structured by an acute asymmetry of power between employer and worker. When a Residents' Welfare Association tells its gated community that domestic help must be "enrolled and verified" before entering the premises, most often, the worker's ‘choice’ is an illusion, it is not between consenting and declining. It is between consenting and losing her livelihood. This is what we can call adverse incorporation, that is, the poor are not excluded from systems of governance and accumulation, they are folded into them on terms that extract more than they protect. Calling this "voluntary" is nothing but dressing it up as legal comfort.
The informal sector as the site of accumulation by surveillance
Classical accounts of primitive accumulation described the seizure of land and commons. Today's equivalent, in a data-saturated state, is the seizure of information from populations who have the least capacity to resist it and the least protection when it is misused. Domestic workers are not being asked for consent as autonomous economic agents, they are being harvested as a data resource by a security apparatus that already treats informal labour as inherently suspect. The 54 field Google Form is revealing precisely because of what it deems non-negotiable: Aadhaar number, bank account, religion, nationality, and home coordinates are mandatory, while caste and social media details are merely optional. This hierarchy of "requirements" tells us what the state considers essential to its risk calculus, and it is a calculus built on communal and national origin as much as on any individual conduct. Nepali and Bangladeshi workers, already viewed with suspicion in Indian policing tied to anxieties about the border and illegal migration, are central to the exercise. And by making religion mandatory, it opens the door to communal profiling, under the cover of crime prevention.
The developmental alibi
Every extension of surveillance into the lives of the working poor arrives wrapped in the language of development and welfare. They are backed by terms such as financial inclusion, digital empowerment, safety, formalisation. The DPDP Act, 2023, compliance claim made by the Mee Suraksha app performs the same function. It allows the state to say and follow the words of consent, purpose limitation, data protection, however the underlying architecture does the opposite of what those words promise. Section 17 of the DPDP Act carves out broad exemptions for processing "in the interest of prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution of any offence." However it disapplies most of the Act's consent and notice obligations for law-enforcement-linked data collection.
Legal commentators have warned that the Act's exemptions leave data principals with little practical recourse or right to compensation when state agencies are the ones doing the collecting. Critical development scholars have long argued that projects like biometric IDs, welfare databases and gig-platform verification rather than protecting workers, make workers visible and trackable, to both the state and employers.
Whose security, whose city?
Crime data does not support the implicit premise that domestic workers are a significant criminal threat to gated communities; if anything, the far larger and better-documented pattern is the abuse, wage theft, confinement, and violence that domestic workers themselves suffer at the hands of employers. The country has also not ratified ILO Convention 189 on decent work for domestic workers, which would guarantee rest hours, minimum wage, and freedom of movement. There is no equivalent 54 field form demanding employers disclose their financial history, their treatment of previous employees, or their home's GPS coordinates for the worker's safety. Security, here in this scheme, flows only in one direction, toward the property-owning, apartment-dwelling resident. The risks, exposure, and the burden of proving innocence rests with the worker.
The gender and caste substrate
No account of domestic work surveillance is complete without naming its gendered character. The overwhelming majority of domestic workers are women, many from Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC communities or migrant backgrounds that already carry caste and ethnic stigma in urban labour markets. Also, one should not forget how the domestic workers are often asked to use separate elevators in the residential complexes, and do not have access to basic facilities such as washrooms and clean drinking water.
A database that records religion and permits caste disclosure, built by police and enforced through residents associations, sits within a long history in which the Indian state has used registration and surveillance regimes, from colonial-era Criminal Tribes profiling to contemporary predictive policing, to reproduce caste and community-based suspicion under a modern administrative vocabulary. This can be seen as durability of colonial governmentality where technologies change, the underlying logic of sorting populations into the governable and the suspect does not.
What accountability would actually look like
None of this is an argument against safety for residents or against domestic workers having secure, formal employment relationships. It is an argument that the current design inverts the logic of protection. A genuine worker-safety intervention would centre the domestic worker's own vulnerability such as mandatory written contracts, wage protections, grievance redress mechanisms, health and accident coverage, and independent oversight of employers, not a police-controlled biometric-adjacent database that a worker must submit to in order to be permitted to work. If Telangana's police wish to invoke Mee Suraksha's rhetoric of protection honestly, the burden of registration, verification, and disclosure should fall at least as heavily on employers as on the women who clean their homes. Until then, this initiative should be understood for what the critical reading exposes it as, not a safety net, but a cast over the city's most precarious workers in the name of protecting everyone but them.
Boddu Srujana is an Assistant Professor with Department of Economics, Easwari School of Liberal Arts, SRM University-Andhra Pradesh.
Views expressed are the author’s own.