December 22, 2011, 6:02 AM
A woman getting her fingerprints scanned in New Delhi on March 26 for India’s national identity program.
NEW DELHI — Earlier this month, just two days after my grandfather and I received a summons to register for India’s national unique identification (UID) program, a sweeping initiative launched with much fanfare, a parliamentary committee ordered a review of the project, effectively freezing it.
When the UID program was created in 2009, the idea was to assign a unique 12-digit number to 200 million of India’s poorest citizens based on their biometric information. The goal was to ensure that welfare entitlements would be delivered to their intended recipients rather than siphoned off by corrupt middlemen. The project was subsequently expanded to cover India’s entire billion-plus population and serve as the basis for issuing cellphone connections and bank accounts.
But in its report calling for a review of the UID, the parliamentary committee noted that in the absence of a legal framework to collect and protect all that personal information, the database could be abused.
You might think that the freeze would come as a victory to those who have feared that the UID project would create a state-controlled panopticon under the guise of curbing corruption — except that the measure was suspended in favor of the National Population Register (NPR), an older effort to gather the same information that has far more questionable objectives.
The NPR has its roots in “Operation Pushback,” a 1992 government policy launched under pressure from xenophobic groups in order to identify and deport undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants from Delhi. It seeks to gather the biometric data of every single Indian citizen exclusively to assist law enforcement. The idea gained traction in 2003, while the right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party was in power.
The Indian government hopes to eventually integrate the UID and the NPR to create the world’s largest biometric database. But it is unclear that either project can deliver on its promises, and both have the potential to do much harm.
Lacking the documents to prove that they are entitled to government schemes, a large percentage of India’s poor are currently forced to bribe officials to obtain benefits. Theoretically, the UID could fix this problem, but as the parliamentary review committee noted, there are hurdles.
The biometric identification of manual laborers fails in 15 percent of cases, for instance: it seems that working with your hands blurs your fingerprints. This means that a significant number of workers could find themselves locked out of their welfare accounts. UID officials have said that they expect contingency plans to address such failures as they occur, but in India, contingency plans have a way of becoming standard operating procedures that enable unscrupulous officials to subvert the system. Designed as a tool of inclusion, the UID could thus become a means of exclusion.
The problems with the NPR are even worse. In 2003, the Delhi High Court tasked the city police with arresting and deporting at least 100 undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants every day. Officers started rounding up impoverished Bengali-speaking Muslims who couldn’t furnish enough evidence of their Indianness. At least 40,000 individuals were deported between 2003 and 2006, according to government figures, and many of them, according to NGOs, were Indian citizens. If a malfunctioning UID could deny you entitlements, a missing entry in the NPR could get you deported.
Proponents of the databases insist that technology can help make the Indian state more transparent and more accountable to its citizens. I am not convinced. Technology may eliminate certain kinds of corruption by reducing the potential for human interference in the disbursement of entitlements. But administrators will still wield inordinate power as the gatekeepers of these vast and opaque information banks.
Why put our biometrics, faith and freedom in the hands who those who have done little to gain our trust so far?
Aman Sethi covers conflict, mining and industrialization in central India for The Hindu. He is the author of “A Free Man.”
