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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Blundering along, dangerously -Usha Ramanathan
-Frontline.in

The Aadhaar project’s headlong push towards “total” enrolment of Indian citizens threatens the privacy of individuals on an unprecedented scale, while its patchy biometric system acts as a tool of denial for the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, the UID chugs along, regardless, fuelled by the avarice of private interests who seek to cash in on citizen data.

IN the last seven years, the right to privacy of Indian citizens has been downgraded in several crucial steps. It was argued that Google and Facebook had more information than any other database; and that the voter IDs in several States, with personally identifiable information, were publicly available. Zealous advocates on a techno-utopian mission argued that the trifling matter of privacy would have to give way to the sheer convenience offered by technology. The argument went thus: it is only those who have something to hide who ask for privacy and, conversely, those who have nothing to hide ought not to worry about the loss of privacy. In August 2015, all this was brought to a head when the government categorically told the court that was hearing the unique identification number (UID) cases that the people of this country simply did not have a right to privacy. Significantly, at the same time as the right to privacy was being denied, before another bench of the court, the government was asserting that the offence of defamation in Section 499 of the Indian Penal Code needed to remain on the statute book so as to enable the government to protect the right to privacy. Privacy advocates were disparaged as espousing elite interests, that the poor have no interest in privacy, but only in being able to get their entitlements.

The spate of notifications making it mandatory to “seed” the UID number in a bewildering multiplicity of databases have placed the privacy debate on a wholly different plane. Crucially, they have highlighted concerns that the privacy rights of the poor, far from being an esoteric matter, are literally a matter of life and death for a large section of the population. In the process, the poor, the disadvantaged and the weak are in danger of losing not only their legitimate entitlements but their very dignity.

In September 2010, 17 eminent citizens, including Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, Prof. Romila Thapar, Prof. Upendra Baxi, administrator S.R. Sankaran , Justice A.P. Shah, film-maker Amar Kanwar, social activists Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Deep Joshi, and advocate K.G. Kannabiran, issued a statement asking for the UID project not to forge ahead without a law, without a feasibility report, and without considering its implications for privacy (see full text of the statement on page 30). Bezwada Wilson, the national president of the Safai Karmachari Andolan, a signatory, explains that the identity project does not seem to understand the principles of identity; what those employed as manual scavengers want, he explains, is to bury their identity, not perpetuate it. The notification making it mandatory to seed the UID number as a prelude to the rehabilitation of a person engaged in manual scavenging is precisely the problem that Wilson has been battling in his opposition to the UID project.

Women rescued from prostitution, bonded labour, victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, persons who are HIV-positive and needing anti-retroviral therapy (ART), those building toilets with state assistance, persons with disabilities, and children in the mid-day meal scheme are all being compelled to affix their UID numbers to different databases. There is simply no question of consent. Neither is there a provision to opt out. The language of entitlements has been displaced by “benefits”, “subsidies” and “services” in the Aadhaar Act 2016. Notification after notification begin with the bland statement that seeding the UID number “simplifies governmental delivery processes, bringing in transparency and efficiency, and enables beneficiaries to get their entitlements directly in a convenient and seamless manner… obviating the need for producing multiple documents to prove one’s identity”.

With these notifications, the privacy debate has moved onto another level, indeed onto another terrain, where the dignity of a person and the heightened vulnerability of the individual are added to the concerns of convergence, profiling and surveillance. These notifications also make plain the privacy interests of the poor in relation to the UID project.

Private interests, public data

One of the provisions in the Aadhaar Act 2016 which makes it impossible to justify its passage as a Money Bill is Section 57. It permits the “use of the Aadhaar number for establishing the identity of an individual for any purpose, whether by the state or any body corporate or person...”.

Indeed, much before the UID acquired the protection and sanction of the law, the growing cacophony of private companies’ interest in the project was articulated openly by business interests. They enthusiastically welcomed the implementation of the project because the system could be used to “leverage” businesses. In fact, when the Aadhaar Bill was being debated in the Rajya Sabha, parliamentarians cited the instance of TrustID, which advertised itself as “India’s 1st Aadhaar-based mobile app to verify your maid, driver, electrician, tutor, tenant and everyone instantly”. This is a business model in which the UID authentication is used as the foundation on which profiles are built.

BetterPlace offers “multipoint verification and safety capabilities through a combination of sources—location-based data analytics, digital footprint of an individual and Aadhaar information”.

In February 2017, OnGrid caused outrage when it tweeted an image with the photograph of a young man across which read:

Aadhaar Number: 8625-xxxx-7706

Name: Kxxxxx Sxxxxx

Mobile: xxxxxxxxxx

DoB: xx xx 1986

Gender: x

Aadhaar address: xxxx

Current address: xxxx

Police verification: xxxx

On the screen was “indiastack.org/ekyc”.

The website carried the description, “Aadhaar-enabled Trust Bureau of India”. “OnGrid is a trust bureau that modernises verification and background checks in India by linking an individual’s data, documents and incidents to his/her 12-digit aadhaar number for a faster and cleaner access to true identity and background.”

BetterPlace advertises itself as “leveraging multiple data sources, including Aadhaar—the massive database of biometric and demographic data of the entire country. BetterPlace has in place and continues to create a unique profile of every citizen with accurate and comprehensive personal, professional and social information.”

Data gathering about individuals, and profiling, are the business model of these UID-based companies, even as data emerge as the new property.

A closed circuit of interests

In 2013, a grouping of technology entrepreneurs got together as iSpirt—Indian Software Product Industry Roundtable. Nandan Nilekani is their mentor. Two others who stepped down from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)—Pramod Varma, who was Chief Technology Architect of Aadhaar, and Sanjay Jain, who was Chief Product Manager—are volunteers with iSpirt and work on creating India Stack, which is a stack of applications being built on the UID platform. Their paid employment is with Ek Step, a philanthropy established by Rohini and Nandan Nilekani. They work on the stack, and, as Nilekani says in his book Rebooting India, evangelise it to the government. Some of the components of the stack were created and adopted when Nilekani was still Chairperson of the UIDAI. In 2009, even before the first enrolment, the Aadhaar Auth API (Aadhaar Authentication Application Programming Interface) was launched. In 2011 the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) launched the Aadhaar Payments Bridge and Aadhaar Enabled Payments System. The “National” and “India” in NPCI are misleading; established in December 2008 with N.R. Narayana Murthy as its first Chairperson, it is a company registered under the Companies Act as a non-profit, and Nandan Nilekani and Pramod Varma are honorary consultants telling the NPCI how to adopt the UID number in its working. In 2012 eKYC was launched. Then a hiatus, after which in 2015, eSign. In 2016, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched, as was the DigiLocker.

A technology-based structure is being evangelised to the government which will give a leg-up to fintech companies. In the Credit Suisse India Financials Report 2016, Nilekani candidly sets out the ambitions: India will go from being a data poor country to becoming a data rich country in two to three years. “Digital footprints” will form part of this data. “And as data becomes the new currency, financial institutions will be willing to forgo transaction fees to get rich digital information on their customers.”

The “go cashless” brigade’s zeal, in much evidence after demonetisation, is not confined to the innocent dream of replacing cash with more modern payment systems. In reality, cashless is the next big pitch to convert personal data of the mass of Indian citizens into tangible—and profitable—business opportunities.

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