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Aadhaar, with several loopholes, has become an embarrassment for the government
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On September 23, two judges of the Supreme Court directed that “no person should suffer for not getting the Aadhaar card”. Why did the court need to say this?
In 2009 and 2010, when the project had just been launched, enrolment was promoted as being voluntary. It was marketed as a convenience for those who already had other forms of identity; and a boon to those without any identity document, with the poor as the primary constituency. It was presented as a means to practise ‘inclusion’, that is, those for whom benefits and subsidies had been out of reach because they had no means of identifying themselves to the State and other private entities would now have an identity.
Yet, the small print, even then, was saying something else. In April 2010, the Strategy Overview document of the UIDAI read: “UID will not be mandated: The UIDAI approach will be a demand-driven one, where the benefits and services that are linked to the UID will ensure demand for the number. This will not, however, preclude governments or Registrars from mandating enrolment.” So, making the UID mandatory was intended; only, the UID would work on, and with, Registrars to introduce the element of compulsion. This allowed the UIDAI to keep talking about ‘inclusion’, while governments and their departments would be egged on to bully people into enrolling for a UID on threat of exclusion from services. Take the proposed linking up between the UID and the PDS in a UIDAI document titled (no marks for guessing) UID and PDS. “To support enrolment, the central government will mandate that the UID numbers of each family member should be recorded in the ration card and the data base should be made available” to the UIDAI. That is quite unambiguous! Its document titled UID and Public Health has this: “Every citizen must have a strong incentive or a “killer application” to go and get herself a UID, which one could think of as a demand side pull. The demand side pull needs to be created de novo or fostered on existing platforms by the respective ministries. Helping various ministries visualise key applications that leverage existing government entitlement schemes such as the PDS and the NREGA will (1) get their buy-in into the project (2) help them roll out mechanisms that generate the demand pull....”. These are documents that have been around since 2009-10, and the UIDAI has been hard at work getting governments and agencies to link the UID number to all manner of services. Why does it matter that the UID is made mandatory? One, there is yet no law that covers this project. The UIDAI has been saying that should not matter because they were set up by an executive order, and that should be quite enough. That is a wholly questionable proposition, and it is, in fact, under challenge in court. But, the fact that a law was in fact introduced in Parliament in December 2010, and the Standing Committee on Finance rejected it in a scathing report that asked that both the project and the law be sent back to the drawing board, cannot be glossed over. There is also no law protecting privacy; the idea of data about individuals being the new property is helped by trivialising the right to privacy. Then, there is a startling fact that too few people have recognised: biometrics, which the UIDAI has been claiming can uniquely identify every individual, had not been tested when the project began. The decision was made on assumptions. This is not just a hypothesis. Take a look at this: In a ‘notice inviting applications for hiring of biometrics consultant’ issued by the UIDAI in January/February 2010, the UIDAI admitted complete ignorance about the effectiveness of biometrics: “there is a lack of a sound study that documents the accuracy achievable on Indian demographics (that is, larger percentage of rural population) and in Indian environmental conditions (that is, extremely hot and humid climates and facilities without air-conditioning). In fact, we do not have any credible study assessing the achievable accuracy in any of the developing countries.... The ‘quality’ assessment of fingerprint data (in the UIDAI’s ‘preliminary assessment’) is not sufficient to fully understand the achievable de-duplication accuracy.” It was in this state of ignorance that the decision to make biometrics the ‘unique’ factor was made. Today, three years later, it has become evident that old people and the poor are facing hurdles in authenticating themselves through biometrics. The UIDAI’s own authentication reports reveal how flawed the system is. More recently, the UIDAI has been talking of thousands of permanent enrolment stations, and people are advised to periodically re-enrol their fingerprints and iris. This is the first admission that biometrics are not forever, and that they change. Yet, the project refuses to pause. Making the UID mandatory in a system that cannot authenticate with any degree of certainty is only a prescription for massive exclusion. Why is no one in government verifying the field situation and asking the tough questions? Direct Benefit Transfer has shown itself to be a mere excuse for making the UID mandatory. In Delhi and Maharashtra, for instance, registering a will or a rent agreement or a sale deed, or getting married, needs a UID. Government servants, and high court judges, in Maharashtra are not to get their salaries unless they are enrolled. In Kerala, children cannot be enrolled in schools. In Delhi, EWS category were threatened with exclusion. Everywhere, gas subsidy is mandatorily linked with the UID number. And the list goes on. It is no wonder that the court was asked to step in to stop this rampant and irresponsible use of a number produced through a deeply defective process. The writer works on the jurisprudence of law, poverty and rights Usha Ramanathan
Today, three years later, it has become evident that old people and the poor are facing hurdles in authenticating themselves through biometrics. The UIDAI’s own authentication reports reveal how flawed the system is
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Published Date: Sep 27, 2013
