Now, as little details of the totally non-transparent Aadhar are coming out in the press due to the recent scam by Mohammed Ali, we realize how pathetic Aadhar's software has been, and the only place for it seems to be the trash bin. It is a shame that it has come from a high-profile personality such as Nandan Nilekani and thousands of crores of tax payers' money has gone into it.
First of all, a few weeks back, a news item appeared that an entity --- not even a human being --- by the name of coriander with father named biryani was issued an Aadhar number. There is no idea what biometric was used to get the number but the face was that of a mobile phone, not even a human being. The Aadhar software failed to detect the fraud.
And now there is news that Mohammed Ali, an enroller of Aadhar, has created 30,000 Aadhar ids in a span of six months. Given the rate at which he has created the ids, they seem fake. Out of the 30,000, 800 have been created in the physically-disabled category stating that the people did not have hands and were blind as well, thus they did not have any of the biometrics -- neither fingerprints or iris --- needed by UIDAI. The interesting point is what biometrics were used for the rest of the ids namely around 29200 which were in the regular category. And if the ids were fake, what was the much touted de-duplication software of UIDAI doing that it passed all of them? The fraud was detected only because someone noticed that one enroller had created a huge number of ids in a small time. In other words, if Mohammed Ali had created only a couple of thousand ids --- those which a normal enroller enrols --- this fraud would have gone unnoticed. Not just that, there could be many other such Alis who are already around and who have gone unnoticed and probably will never be caught.
UIDAI claims that the project will detect and reduce frauds in schemes such as NREGA. Now UIDAI software itself seems so full of security holes that NREGA and other schemes themselves may be already doing a much better job than UIDAI on fraud detection.
Another fact that has come up is that for enrollers, if the biometric fails twice, the third time whatever is given is accepted by the UIDAI system by default and authentication granted. This, for a security system in this time and age?
And UIDAI claims it has companies such as Ernst and Young as security consultants?
All in all, Aadhar seems to be the mother of all scams where thousand of crores of tax payers' money are spent by fooling a government that is not aware of the issues. Not just Aadhar should be scrapped immediately, but a thorough probe is needed, especially since people had warned of the issues beforehand and no notice was taken. Indeed each and every paisa spent from the tax payers' kitty needs to be recoverd from the perpetuators, backers of this scam called Aadhar, which is more appropriately called Aandhar meaning darkness in Marathi.
Samir Kelekar
Bangalore
