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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Aadhaar may be getting too big for its own good -Mihir Sharma
-Livemint.com

Aadhaar’s designers promised a robust privacy legislation, but the current government’s stance is that Indians have no fundamental right to privacy

To govern India is to be constantly overwhelmed. So much needs to be done, and there’s so little to do it with. It’s hardly surprising that the Indian state is rarely ambitious. It seeks to manage, not to transform.

One recent government initiative, less than a decade old, is by contrast epic in scope: the attempt to provide every resident of India with a unique, biometrics-linked ID number. This gratifyingly big programme, however, is in danger of getting too big.

In India, proving one’s identity is painful and sometimes impossible. Last week, merely in order to replace a SIM card that had stopped working, I had to provide three different forms of identification, including a recent rent agreement. Unless you can show you’re tied to a particular location, the Indian state doesn’t trust you— odd for a country where a quarter of the population migrates at one time or another.

And I at least have, or can lay my hands on, this sort of paperwork. For the vast majority of Indians, that’s long been impossible. Unable to prove their identity, they’ve also been unable to open bank accounts, take out insurance or even access basic government services.

The Unique ID project, or Aadhaar, was supposed to solve this problem. Those of India’s 1.3 billion residents who lacked documents would have their fingerprints recorded—and their irises scanned, just in case—and receive a number in return. That number would serve as a unique identifier, a stand-in for all other forms of identification. If needed, it could be used to borrow money, tap into a pension account and so on. If ever you had to prove your identity to access some service, the provider would check your fingerprints against a central database, which would then say, “Yes, this person is attached to this unique number, as surely as she is attached to her fingers.”

It was a simple, lightweight, elegant solution. I was entranced the moment I first heard of it, convinced it was critically necessary. The costs seemed minimal: The original planners of Aadhaar, under India’s last administration, pledged it would be simple and voluntary.

And, indeed, the program has fulfilled much of its promise. Over a billion Aadhaar numbers have now been handed out. Reliance Jio, a new mobile phone network from the Reliance Industries Ltd conglomerate, recently used the Aadhaar network to enroll 100 million subscribers in three months—in the same country where I ran around with a large folder stuffed with papers to replace my own SIM card. The government now has the option of transferring welfare payments directly to Aadhaar-linked bank accounts, cutting out India’s notoriously corrupt middlemen.

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