UID- Budget by Usha Ramanathan
The Finance Minister in his budget speech has said that they will be giving the `aadhaar platform’ a statutory framework. He intends to introduce it in a bill for Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services. All benefits, subsidies and services funded from the consolidated fund of India are to be channelled through the aadhaar platform. Interestingly, Mr Jaitley now says that the “aadhaar number or authentication shall not, however, confer any right of citizenship or domicile”.
The proposal does not, of course, amount to a law that will govern the UID project. This is merely an attempt to legalise the compulsion that the UPA and the BJP governments have been practising all along, in wanton violation of the Supreme Court’s orders. (There are many of these orders, by the way, made on 23 September 2013, 26 November 2013, 24 March 2014, 16 March 2015, 11 August 2015, 15 October 2015 – and they have been observed mainly in the breach.)
This is a simplistic response to what is really a complex matter. There is a bill pending in the Rajya Sabha – the National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010 – which has been considered by a Parliamentary Standing Committee. The Standing Committee, cutting across party lines, and chaired by Mr Yashwant Sinha, rejected the Bill and the project for a range of reasons that they set out in the report. Those concerns need to be addressed. There are a range of cases challenging the project on grounds that include convergence and surveillance, biometrics as untested technology, the role of foreign firms connected with the security establishments in their countries and the national security implications it raised, privacy, data as property, threat of exclusion from services and entitlements, the absence of a law governing the project. These cannot be brushed aside. The government argued, in the context of the UID project, that privacy is not a fundamental right, and convinced the court that it should refer the matter to be decided by a larger bench. The court obliged, and the question now hangs in unhappy uncertainty till it is heard and decided by the larger bench. Till it is decided, it is the citizen’s rights that need to be safeguarded.
If the government intends to use aadhaar, it must surely at least find out if it can work as identification? In the past six months at least, the UIDAI page carries an admission that biometrics is still in the stage of being researched. A Unique Biometrics Centre of Competence has been set up in the UIDAI whose `mission’ is to “design biometrics system that enables India to achieve uniqueness in the national registry. The endeavour of designing such a system is an ongoing quest to innovate biometrics technology appropriate for the Indian conditions”. In the opening section titled “UBCC and Research”, the document reads: “Biometrics features are selected to be primary mechanisms for ensuring uniqueness. No country has undertaken to build a national registry at the scale and accuracy as UIDAI initiative. Nature and diversity of India's working population adds another challenge to achieving uniqueness through biometric features. Like other technology fields such as telecommunication, we do not have experience like developed countries to leverage for designing UIDAI's biometrics systems…Therefore, it is necessary to create a UIDAI Biometrics Centre of Competence that focuses on the unique challenges of UIDAI”.
This comes as no surprise. In January-February 2010, in a document that was an invitation to biometrics consultants, the UIDAI had been candid: “There is a lack of a sound study that documents the accuracy achievable on Indian demographics (i.e., larger percentage of rural population) and in Indian environmental conditions (i.e., extremely hot and humid climate and facilities without air-conditioning). In fact we could not find any credible study assessing the achievable accuracy in any of the developing countries….The ‘quality’ assessment of fingerprint data is not sufficient to fully understand the achievable de-duplication accuracy”. Yet, the decision to adopt the technology had been made even before the Proof of Concept was done.
In court, the Attorney General waved a `micro-ATM’, aiming to impress the looker-on with the genius of the technology that was so little and could perform the miracle of taking money to the doorstep. What he did not say was that it is not automatic, it does not dispense cash, and it is controlled by a person who acts as the teller and who is to hand over cash. This is the Business Correspondent. A 2009 RBI report and the Economic Survey for 2015-16 speak in one voice about the problems with the BC model, and the unpreparedness for last mile connectivity.
How, in this midst, has the Finance Minister decided that aadhaar is the solution? And, if he goes ahead with this change, where is the protection for the citizen if the technology fails them?
Usha Ramanathan
March 2, 2016
