Lounge
The origins of Aadhaar
Summary
Rahul Bhatia recounts the early days of the UIDAI project in this extract from his book.
In 1998, a young consultant from Tata Consultancy Services was dispatched to the authorities overseeing India’s census, an immense effort carried out once a decade. The company was propelled by the concern that once computer dates ticked from 1999 to 2000, all the IBM mid-range computers it had used to stop the banking system from collapsing and planes falling out of the sky would have no work worth their capabilities. The consultant was twenty-three at the time, and told to suggest that his company could help process the census data. But the man in charge of the census was conservative in his thinking, and enamoured of things as they had been done for the past century. He indicated that the 2001 census would be done by pencil on paper too.
The consultant asked for a meeting with a senior official in the home ministry, a joint secretary who advised him to forget about the census, for there was a bigger concern: the government was considering a national identification system to help them manage unauthorised migration. The consultant recalled that representatives from Unisys and IBM were at one of his meetings. He relayed the message to his boss, who assembled a small team of consultants to work on a concept report for the ministry. She was leaving the company, and installed as the group’s head was an unpredictable thirty-four-year-old with a dim view of the company, who preferred fishing and going off to the mountains instead of doing whatever consultants did. When she thought of him decades later, she remembered his excitement at the work.
I flew to Delhi twenty years later to meet that thirty-four-year-old. The ornate wrought-iron fireplaces scattered around Viraj Chopra’s office provided no evidence of his life’s great contribution to India’s trajectory, and neither did the detachable spectacles imported from Italy that he had once imagined a market for in India; they lay limp around his neck like a regrettable decision. Viraj was past fifty now, and had the bearing of someone whose failures were inconvenient, not ruinous. His face was soft and gently lined with a glossy tan, and fixed in a smile, like everything had been taken care of. His office had more space than a Mumbai flat, and it sat unobtrusively at the edge of a roomy estate in central Delhi. He told me about his detachable spectacle business that hadn’t worked out, about the barely profitable fireplace business, about the corner he wanted to lease out to a bank, about his investments, about the sure-shot stock I would be a fool not to invest in (a tip to ignore, in hindsight), about the new Jeep he had bought, about the fly-fishing trip he had recently taken in the mountains. At one point, he interrupted himself to dart outside and watch a woodpecker that had appeared on an enormous tree in the garden. His was a life in repose.
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Years of working alone will give anybody unusual habits, and his was removing a matchstick from a box and rolling it in his ear as he remembered the events of twenty years ago, when he was a management consultant at Tata Consultancy Services, and was asked to design the identification system that (L.K.) Advani so badly desired. The basic plan was to give every person in India a number that would be used for taxes, driving licences, bank accounts and almost every other service, he said.
Before we began, he wanted me to know just how difficult it was to get a phone connection in India twenty years ago. ‘I had just wanted to buy my wife a phone,’ he said. He rattled off the documents the phone company had asked him for. ‘Passport, electricity bill, rent agreement, house purchase agreement.’ He was struck by the work getting a single phone line entailed, and calculated that India lost up to ‘two hundred billion hours every year in furnishing documents’. Going by this assessment, every man, woman and child spent over eight days every year proving their existence. This was consultant-speak, an exaggeration whose logic could be disassembled in one or two calculations. Viraj took such pleasure in telling his story that I grew sceptical.
He said that when he met the government administrators back in the nineties, he sold them on an identity card that served several functions. Its chief utility was in reducing paperwork and proving once and for all that a person could be verified electronically in seconds. It was a stunt, unthinkable to bureaucrats obsessed with paper, he said. (Nothing roused him like bureaucrats, and he wanted nothing more than to ‘disintermediate the bureaucracy’.) A thing on paper could always be explained. Paper was protection. The bureaucrats asked him to put his thoughts down on paper. But another consultant in the room remembered it slightly differently. ‘The home ministry,’ which was led by Advani, ‘said we needed to have a national ID system, something technologically heavy,’ he said.
Yet Viraj shuffled from meeting to meeting, watching them for a tell. He could see, in the way some of them looked at each other, the way they shifted in their chairs, which ministry was interested. As they talked, tossing about variations of the US social security number, they reached a consensus on the nature of identity itself. ‘It came down to this: our identity is the sum of our transactions with the country,’ Viraj said. ‘Transaction number one is your birth.’ He received the budget he demanded for the feasibility study—thirty lakh rupees.
At some point, the home minister himself started attending the meetings. Advani, who was often clad in a dhoti, watched the proceedings with interest. Viraj had sent six team members to regional transport offices across the country to record the bribes people paid to get a licence made. He put the numbers on a graph for Advani, and explained that a new kind of identification was required. ‘We conceptualised the national ID as a slab. And we designed identity pillars that supported this slab. One pillar was electoral records, birth and death records, all kinds of different IDs. Transaction one is your birth, transaction two being school. Other transactions include your ability to drive, ability to vote, ability to go abroad. And all these transactions build up your identity. These are the transactions that support your identification.’
The bureaucrats watched Advani closely for direction. Advani hoped to be prime minister one day, but he lived in the moment, taking pleasure in his reputation as India’s strongman, the power behind the power. Questions of citizenship were on his mind, and so they were on the mind of the consultants as well. A senior team member interpreted the ministry’s concerns: ‘. . . there was this feeling that internal security, to a large extent, was being threatened by illegal migrants in the country’, and that they were drying up ‘scarce resources’. After a meeting with a high-ranking ministerial secretary, another consultant remembered thinking, ‘Clearly one of the things on their mind was migration from Bangladesh.’ Viraj recalled a paper about unauthorised migrants written by the governor of Assam; officials in Advani’s ministry shared the paper as recommended reading, he said. The paper argued for identification cards, higher border fences and deportation. I read it and found its author concerned by the possibility of annexation by Islamic forces. ‘The influx of these illegal migrants is turning these districts into a Muslim majority region. It will then only be a matter of time when a demand for their merger with Bangladesh may be made,’ he wrote.
‘This report was important because in these meetings with the ministry, illegal immigration came up several times,’ Viraj said. ‘The question was, are you going to issue the illegal immigrants a card? It’s a debilitating thing. Because there are 500,000 Bangladeshi Muslims in Assam, 1.3 billion of us are going to suffer.’
The consultants wondered if national security was reason enough for citizens and residents to adopt another form of identification. Indians had ration cards, passports, permanent account numbers and voter IDs. When the consultants thought about it some more, they decided that the identity project would succeed if it offered the people something in return for their compliance. ‘We were saying that there has to be a carrot. We did not want to push it down people’s throat. We wanted them to want it,’ one of the consultants said to me. That carrot, they agreed, could be welfare. They calculated that by transferring money directly into accounts linked to an identification number, the government’s public sector wage bill could be reduced to a tenth, and that the measure would find support among recipients of welfare.
Edited excerpt published with permission from The Identity Project: The Unmaking of Democracy by Rahul Bhatia, published Westland Books.
