December 9, 2010 at 12:01am
A meeting of concerned citizens gave an unequivocal “thumbs down” to the proposed NIDAI Bill and launched a national campaign of non-cooperation with the controversial “Aadhar” scheme that is already being piloted in some districts of the country.
Human rights activists, representatives of Dalit and minority organisations, IT professionals, urban rights groups, security experts, development workers and Members of Parliament Abani Roy (Revolutionary Socialist Party) and Syed Azeez Pasha (CPI) spoke at the meeting, held on August 25, 2010 in New Delhi.
The Government of India and Nandan Nilekani, Chairperson UIDAI, have been claiming that the UID scheme will enable inclusive growth by providing each citizen with a verifiable identity, that it will facilitate delivery of basic services, that it will plug leakages in public expenditure and that it will speed up achievement of targets in social sector schemes.
Presentations by experts at the meeting comprehensively debunked these claims. Speaker after speaker pointed out that while exclusion and leakages in social sector schemes are serious issues, these are not caused by the inability to prove identity but by the deliberate manipulation of the system by those who have the power to control the flow of benefits.
The UID scheme disowns all responsibility for these systemic issues. In fact, a working paper prepared by the UIDAI states that “the UIDAI is only in the identity business. The responsibility of tracking beneficiaries and the governance of service delivery will continue to remain with the respective agencies ' the job of tracking distribution of food grains among BPL families for example, will remain with the state PDS department.”
This being the case, it seems an unjustified leap of faith for Nilekani and the government to claim that that the UID scheme will promote equitable access to social services.
Fears of surveillance and violation of privacy
Legal researcher and civil rights activist Usha Ramanathan pointed out that the UID proposal violates the individual's right to privacy, currently protected under both international and domestic law, and held by the Supreme Court to be implicit under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution.
Although participation in the UID scheme is supposed to be voluntary and optional, personal and household data for the National Population Register is already being collected by Census enumerators. Census respondents are being told that it is mandatory to submit personal information for the National Population Register. This information is being made available to the UIDAI, in contravention of Section 15 of the Census Act which categorically states that information given for the Census is “not open to inspection nor admissible in evidence”.
The draft Bill does not contain any mechanisms for credible and independent oversight. This increases the risk of the government adding additional features and data, or sharing the database with other agencies, without informing or taking the consent of citizens and without re-evaluating the effects on privacy in each instance. The centralised database where personal data will be stored can easily be “converged” with other databases, such as databases maintained by police and intelligence agencies, or by corporates like banks and credit card companies.
More troubling is the possibility that the UID database will be used to identify and eliminate “maoists”, “terrorists”, “habitual offenders”, political opponents and others who are perceived as threats by those in power. There was general agreement that the involvement of the state in mass carnage (as in Delhi in 1984 and Gujarat in 2002), and the Government's support to and defence of the widespread use of “encounter killings” and other extra-constitutional methods by the police, armed forces and vigilante groups like the Salwa Judum in Chattisgarh and the VHP in Kandhamal, has already created an enabling environment for abuse of the UID database to serve undemocratic, illegal and unethical purposes.
Speakers expressed concern that Nandan Nilekani and his team have consistently deflected and refused to respond to concerns about security, surveillance and human rights, which have been repeatedly raised on public platforms by concerned citizens. Senior UID officials have even stated that the risks of surveillance and profiling are acceptable trade-offs for the “inclusion and portability that the scheme will confer.
Risks of ‘exclusion' and false data
Internet security and biometrics expert Jude D'Souza argued convincingly that, far from facilitating inclusion, around 150 million people are likely to be excluded from social benefits as a result of the UID scheme. Fingerprinting and iris scans ' the two biometrics that the UID scheme will use ' have been shown to have a high margin of error and are easily “spoofed”, and are therefore unreliable as identifiers.
Agricultural workers, construction workers and other manual labourers have calloused and scarred fingers and ‘low-quality' fingerprints. An NREGA beneficiary could present his newly-issued UID number as a conclusive proof of identity to claim payment, but could find the application rejected because a fingerprint scanner could classify the applicant's worn-out fingers as a so-called ‘false negative'. Even going by a conservative error rate of 5 percent, this means that at least 15 lakh people out of the 30 million NREGS job card holders will therefore be put at risk of exclusion.
Iris scans are no more reliable than fingerprints. An iris scan cannot be done on people with corneal blindness, glaucoma or corneal scars. This means that the 6-8 million Indians with corneal blindness, and the much larger number of people with corneal scars (caused by infections or injuries to the eyes) will be excluded from the scheme.
Both fingerprint scanners and iris scanners can be easily “spoofed” or fooled ' for instance, latex and adhesives can be used to create false fingerprints and coloured contact lenses can obscure iris patterns.
Security gaps in UID software technology
IT security experts warned that the technical details of the UID software are easily available and security experts have already assessed the UID database as being very vulnerable to hacking. A confidential working paper titled "Creating a Unique Identity Number for Every Resident in India", recently posted on the transparency website Wikileaks, admits that "the UID database will be susceptible to attacks and leaks at various levels".
The recent arrest of a Hyderabad-based software professional who demonstrated the security gaps in electronic voting machines raises the concern that researchers and IT security experts who are exposing the vulnerabilities in the UID software, are likely to be penalised and silenced.
Huge amounts of money that have been made available to the UIDAI, without any approval from Parliament or discussion in the public domain about the necessity of such a scheme. It took several RTI applications from citizens' groups before even the basic documents were uploaded on the website. The point was made that the allocation to UIDAI was at the cost of other social sector schemes.
MPs Abani Roy (Revolutionary Socialist Party) and Syed Azeez Pasha (CPI) deplored the undemocratic way in which the UIDAI has been set up and characterised the UID scheme as an “expensive and dangerous project” through which several companies will capture massive contracts at the expense of the public exchequer.
There was universal agreement on the need to take immediate action to inform people of the risks involved and the false claims being made by the UIDAI. The UID scheme needs to be seen in the larger context of the shrinking space for democratic dissent, undermining of civil liberties and cooptation of civil society groups and movements into becoming guarantors and monitors for supposedly “rights-based” schemes such as the NREGA. It is a matter of concern that many civil society groups, the media and opinion-makers are lending their support to the scheme without examining its implications.
The group decided to launch a campaign of non-cooperation to stop the UIDAI in its tracks. Activities for broad-based public education and mobilisation, as well as lobbying with MPs and key opinion-makers will also be intensified in the next few months.
