It would be the first project of this scale in the world that took off without a prior-launch study, cost-benefit analysis, comparative feasibility study, technical feasibility study and an enabling law.
Can you believe, even a Detailed Project Report was prepared only in April 2011, two years since the project began. The objections raised by the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Finance have far reaching consequences. Let’s examine one by one.
Legality of the project and data protection policy
Many eminent personalities including former Supreme Court Justice. V R Krishna Iyer, Historian Romila Thaper, Independent Law Researcher Dr. Usha Ramanathan, Magsaysay Award winner Aruna Roy , Booker prize winner Arundhathi Roy have questioned the legal validity of the whole exercise.
The standing committee on finance observes that:” The clearance of the Ministry of Law & Justice for issuing aadhaar numbers, pending passing the Bill by Parliament, on the ground that powers of the Executive are co-extensive with the legislative power of the Government and that the Government is not debarred from exercising its Executive power in the areas which are not regulated by the legislation does not satisfy the Committee. The Committee are constrained to point out that in the instant case, since the law making is underway with the bill being pending, any executive action is as unethical and violative of Parliament‟s prerogatives”[1] The committee also observed that a National Data Protection Law is “ a pre-requisite for any law that deals with large scale collection of information from individuals and its linkages across separate databases would be difficult to deal with the issues like access and misuse of personal information, surveillance, profiling, linking and matching of data bases and securing confidentiality of information etc. “[2] The UIDAI’s claim that it has incorporated data protection principles within its policy and implementation framework does not satisfy the committee.
In another observation that could raise many questions on the legalities of collection of biometrics even for NPR, the committee notes that “The collection of biometric information and its linkage with personal information of individuals without amendment to the Citizenship Act, 1955 as well as the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003, appears to be beyond the scope of subordinate legislation, which needs to be examined in detail by Parliament”.[3]
Privacy and Civil Liberty
The committee deliberated at length on the civil liberty perspective of the project and considered opinions from eminent personalities in the field of law and civil rights. And speaking on the possibilities of data misuse notes that “The Committee are at a loss to understand as to how the UIDAI, without statutory power, could address key issues concerning their basic functioning and initiate proceedings against the defaulters and penalize them”[4] The committee also notes that the scheme leads to ID fraud as prevalent in some countries.
National Security
The committee has expressed concern over the implications of the Project Aadhaar on national security. The committee is “The Committee are unable to understand the rationale of expanding the scheme to persons who are not citizens, as this entails numerous benefits proposed by the Government”[5] “This will, they apprehend, make even illegal immigrants entitled for an aadhaar number”. The committee especially is concerned about the efficacy of introducer system on national security. As opined by many the introducer system could result in many anti-national and anti-social elements acquiring aadhaar numbers on false addresses.
The committee has also noted that the Ministry of Home affairs has expressed concern over the methodology data collection, reliability and security of the data and the chances of fraud.
The project is Directionless and has no clarity of purpose.
According to the standing committee report the scheme is riddled with serious lacunae and concernes. “The UID scheme has been conceptualized with no clarity of purpose and leaving many things to be sorted out during the course of its implementation; and is being implemented in a directionless way with a lot of confusion.”[6] The report continues “…The scheme which was initially meant for BPL families has been extended for all residents in India and to certain other persons. The Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM), constituted for the purpose of collating the two schemes namely, the UID and National Population Register(NPR), and to look into the methodology and specifying target for effective completion of the UID scheme, failed to take concrete decision on important issues…” More importantly the committee has observed that that the UID scheme lacks clarity on even the basic purpose of issuing “aadhaar” number.
Financial Exclusion
Observation 3(f) of the standing committee reads: “The full or near full coverage of marginalized sections for issuing aadhaar numbers could not be achieved mainly owing to two reasons viz. (i) the UIDAI doesn’t have the statistical data relating to them; and (ii) estimated failure of biometrics is expected to be as high as 15% due to a large chunk of population being dependent on manual labour.”[7] Even the Ministry of Planning in their written reply to the standing committee stated that “failure to enroll is a reality”.[8] The introducer system wont be of much use. How many introducers or GOs would be there to introduce millions of slum dwellers, tribal population, or in rural India where they hardly have electricity or internet connectivity? (friendly government school teachers who rang your door bell a year ago may perhaps know some of them) If they can find some introducers, why can’t some anti-social elements too can find out some others? The result would be disastrous for our national security for innumerable foreign national (including terrorists) would be enrolled in Aadhaar database with local addresses. Chances are that many more people in rural India where there is no electricity and internet connectivity will be excluded from social welfare schemes even if they acquire aadhaar number.
The committee in observation 3(d) notes: “Continuance of various existing forms of identity and the requirement of furnishing „other documents‟ for proof of address, even after issue of aadhaar number, would render the claim made by the Ministry that aadhaar number is to be used as a general proof of identity and proof of address meaningless”. UIDAI clearly says that UID is no substitutes for existing Ids and The Working Paper of the UIDAI which starts with a claim that UID will help the poor access various services ends with a caveat: “UID will only guarantee identity, not rights, benefits and entitlements” (emphasis added) and surely that isn’t a misprint. Why should people have aadhaar if they would have to have ration cards to have rice, voters ID to vote and all other ID documents, if at all they are to get some benefits? How can aadhaar pave way for financial inclusion if it does not guarantee them anything (like ration cards guarantee ration)? Those who are invisible to the state will still be invisible even if they have UID. If that is the case , why should we need AADHAAR at all?
Dependancy on Private Players
“The National Informatics Centre (NIC) have pointed out that the issues relating to privacy and security of UID data could be better handled by storing in a Government data centre;”[9] . Even then the UID project is dependent on private players. The committee further notes: “9. The Committee are afraid that the scheme may end up being dependent on private agencies, despite contractual agreement made by the UIDAI with several private vendors. As a result, the beneficiaries may be forced to pay over and above the charges to be prescribed by the UIDAI for availing of benefits and services, which are now available free of cost “[10]. UIADAI has entered into contracts with several government and non-government agencies for enrollment and data collection. The private companies include foreign companies like L1 Identitiy solutions and Accenture that have even ex-CIA officials on board and as staff.
Untested, Unreliable and Unsafe Technology
Standing committee highlights the criticism raised by London School of economics in their study on UK ID Project (that was abandoned in 2010 and had UK ID act 2006 repealed). For instance, the United Kingdom shelved its Identity Cards Project for a number of reasons, which included:- (a) huge cost involved and possible cost overruns; (b) too complex; (c) untested, unreliable and unsafe technology; (d) possibility of risk to the safety and security of citizens; and (e) requirement of high standard security measures, which would result in escalating the estimated operational costs. In this context, the Report of the London School of Economics‟ Report on UK‟s Identity Project inter-alia states that “…..identity systems may create a range of new and unforeseen problems……the risk of failure in the current proposals is therefore magnified to the point where the scheme should be regarded as a potential danger to the public interest and to the legal rights of individuals”. As these findings are very much relevant and applicable to the UID scheme, they should have been seriously considered.”[11]
The ‘science’ of biometrics is questioned worldwide. In order to understand the errors we should have a basic understanding of how biometrics works. Every time we approach a biometric reader, the reader collects our biometric data like finger print or iris scans and compares it with the reference data already stored in the system. If the collected data matches with the reference data the system will give a positive (“yes”) response. The data is stored in the system not as the finger prints or iris as we see it, but as measured values like the distance between the lines, its depth etc. The problem is that no two samples taken at different times will match 100%. External factors like a slight change in the angle at which the finger is applied on the reader and lighting conditions will change these measurements. So always a tolerance range is provided in the software to accommodate these variations. This tolerance range can cause false positives for their can be other data sets having a similar attributes. If we tighten the tolerance range in order to reduce False Positives chances of false rejections would be higher. That is FPR and FNR are inversely proportional. That is why National Research Centre study concludes that “Human recognition systems are inherently probabilistic and hence inherently fallible”. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the US has said biometrics is not suitable for government applications as we cannot build mathematical models to expand the results of biometric tests to vast databases as the uncertainties involved are indefinite. National research Centre (NRC) of the US concludes that biometrics is inherently fallible. The paper titled “Fundamental issues in biometric performance testing: A modern statistical and philosophical framework for uncertainty assessment” by by Mr. James L Wayman (Office of Graduate Studies and Research, San Jose University, San Jose, USA), Mr. Antonio Possolo (Chief, Information Technology laboratory, statistical engineering Division, NIST, USA), Anthony J Mansfield (National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, U K). Clearly brings out the unreliability of Biometrics. Nobody till date has countered their arguments. London School of Economics in their study on UK ID project termed the technology untested and unproven. Prof. David Moss of London School of Business in a paper showed that by UIDAIs own figures de-duplication is impossible. Accordingly all major developed, democratic nations like Australia, the US, the UK, Holland, France and even China have dropped their Aadhaar-like national biometric ID projects. L1 Identity Solutions and Accenture, the major players who provide biometric equipments and support to Aadhaar are not allowed to undertake similar projects in their homeland (the real ID was abandoned in the USA). Hope you have seen the reports about how the UK ID project was abandoned in 2010 after 8 years since implementation, and how the hard-disks containing the data were dismantled in industrial shredder (that was the only way to secure the data).
If the technology used is untested, unproven, unreliable, unsafe and inherently fallible, there is no point in going on with the project.
Duplication of Works
Various government agencies are collecting demographic and biometric details of the population under different schemes. As per Citizenship Rules 2003, a national ID scheme namely National Population Register (NPR) is underway. The two schemes collecting similar information at a time would lead to duplication of works. The Ministry of Finance (Department of Expenditure) have stated that: “It must be done urgently by single agency, perhaps NPR. Cabinet has approved (22.7.2010) outlay of Rs. 3,023.01 crore inter-alia for assistance for Information Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure of Rs. 450 crore for integrating/ synergizing Aadhaar numbers with existing databases. Concerned about lack of co-rdination leading to duplication effort and expenditure with at least 6 agencies collecting information (NPR, MNREGA, BPL Census, UID, RSBY and Bank Smart Cards)[12]
Financial Burden
The committee discussed at length on the financial implications of the project as evident from page 23-25 of their report. Till date Rs.3170.32 crores have been allotted for the project. More fund clearance is on the anvil. Rs. 8861 crore has been approved for Phase III of the project. There are no clear figures available on the financial burden the project could incur while some independent estimates pegs the cost as high as Rs.1,50,000crores. As was the case with UK ID project, the cost will escalate for sure. Lets quote from the report of the standing committee on finance : “(a) no committee has been constituted to study the financial implications of the UID scheme; and (b) comparative costs of the aadhaar number and various existing ID documents are also not available. The Committee also note that Detailed Project Report (DPR) of the UID Scheme has been done much later in April, 2011. The Committee thus strongly disapprove of the hasty manner in which the UID scheme has been approved. Unlike many other schemes / projects, no comprehensive feasibility study, which ought to have been done before approving such an expensive scheme, has been done involving all aspects of the UID scheme including cost-benefit analysis, comparative costs of aadhaar number and various forms of existing identity, financial implications and prevention of identity theft, for example, using hologram enabled ration card to eliminate fake and duplicate beneficiaries.”[13]
Inaugurating AADHAAR project 29, Sept 2009 in Tembhli Village in Maharashtra, Prime Minister Dr.Mmanmohan Singh called the project the ‘face of modern India’. To Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of UIDAI, the project is the foundation for future development of the nation. If this is the way foundation is made for our future, it is ominous. The fact that, a project of this magnitude was implemented without even the basic formalities needed and an enabling law is a matter of utmost concern. . How can a government approve a sum over Rs.3000 crores for a dubious project, without a benefit analysis study and the approval of the parliament? The only possible reason behind the undue haste in implementing the project is the business interests involved. After 2G, Adarsh Flat and Commeon wealth Games Scams AADHAAR could be the next. This would be more dangerous for the multidimensional impacts the project would have on the entire Indian population. The social, economic, political and ethical impacts of the project are of frightening scale. And well mark the beginning of the end of democracy in India.
Dec 15,2011
Jijeesh PB
(Author of the book: AADHAAR; How a Nation is Deceived, released Nov. 3, 2011 by Justice V R Krishna Iyer at Kochi.)
[1] Page 28 of ‘ Report Standing Committee on Finance, on National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010’
[2] Page 33 of ‘ Report Standing Committee on Finance, on National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010’
Both in Observations/Recommendations Section
[3] Page 3, observation 3(c ) of the report.
[4] Page 30 of ‘ Report Standing Committee on Finance, on National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010’
[5] Page 28, observation 2 of the report.
[6] Page 29, observation 3 (a)
[7] Page 30 of the report
[8] Page 11 of the report
[9] Page 31 of the report
[10] Page 33 of the report
[11] Page 32 of the report
[12] Page 19 of the report
[13] Page 33 of the report
