Last Modified: Thu, Mar 10 2016. 09 52 AM IST
It prevents state overreach while formalizing an essential governance tool
Since its inception as the Unique Identification Authority of India in 2009, the Aadhaar project has grappled with questions of privacy and the scope of its use. These are important issues; they have informed the debate in meaningful ways. But the Aadhaar Bill, 2016, tabled in the Lok Sabha last Thursday, answers them comprehensively.
The Bill must be assessed on three criteria:
What is the purpose of the collected data?
What privacy safeguards does it incorporate?
Is the individual’s informed consent secured?
Clauses 4(3) and 7 answer the first question adequately. They set the Aadhaar number up to be used as proof of identity for receipt of any “subsidy, benefit or service” from the Consolidated Fund of India. The latter also makes it the government’s responsibility to provide alternative means of identification if an individual hasn’t been provided an Aadhaar number.
In other words, the Bill’s positioning of Aadhaar is consistent with its central purpose as originally envisaged—a governance aid to improve subsidy targeting and reduce leakage and corruption. Contrary to fears voiced by many critics that the programme could be used as a vehicle for control by an overbearing state, it has the potential to achieve precisely the opposite. The current model of social sector spending, paternalistic as it is, ensures multiple points of contact between the state and the individual—a recipe for baking patronage into the system. With patronage, naturally, comes retail corruption—a tax paid upon interaction with the state that is, perhaps, the most insidious form of control.
Reducing government footprint and making state-individual interaction frictionless via a switch to direct benefit transfers (DBT) is the only practical method to shift away from the patronage model. And the Aadhaar project is an integral component of the Narendra Modi administration’s JAM trinity—Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and mobile connectivity—needed for making that switch. Savings of roughly 30% in cooking gas subsidy over the past year due to a shift to DBT show just how quickly the benefits can become apparent.
All of this, of course, would be undercut by inadequate provisions for the security and privacy of the data collected under the umbrella of the Aadhaar programme. That is not the case here. The protections written into the Bill are some of the strongest in any legislation on the statute books with regard to privacy. Clauses 28(5), 29(1) and 29(2) unambiguously cordon off identity information from any usage except according to the provisions of the Bill; core biometric data is particularly heavily guarded.
Clause 33 does allow for a national security exception. But it would be unrealistic to cavil at this; no state can be expected to put data it has collected beyond its own reach in such an extreme. There are enough checks and balances to ensure that it cannot be used frivolously—requiring a district judge or a joint secretary to pass an order that must be reviewed by an oversight committee. And with regard to informed consent, the Bill explicitly provides for this at every stage, from enrolment—Clause 3(2)—to the Aadhaar number’s use for identity authentication as per Clause 29(3).
Aadhaar’s critics have pointed to operational flaws that have cropped up thus far, such as 19.2 million Aadhaar numbers being issued in Delhi against a population of 17.7 million. They are correct. A programme of this size—unprecedented globally—is bound to have teething problems. But to argue for dismantling—or putting on hold indefinitely in an endless quest for perfection—instead of improving an administrative structure because of initial problems is absurd. No aspect of the state’s machinery would survive such a test.
And as for arguments that allowing the government to hold any such information is midwifing a police state—not rare, unfortunately—this is a perspective from which the state is solely Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. There is no rational argument to counter this, for it is not in itself rational.
By all means, the Aadhaar programme must be held to the highest standards, from enrolment to safeguarding the Central Identities Data Repository against cyber threats, a not inconsiderable risk. But any governance measure requires a trade-off with privacy; it is a question of degree, cost-benefit ratio and ring-fencing core rights. The Bill manages to strike the correct balance.
Does the Aadhaar Bill safeguard the individual’s rights adequately? Tell us at views@livemint.com
