Opinion
Aadhaar is not perfect but has proven useful
Summary
So long as Aadhaar does its basic job of allowing unique identification, this digital public infrastructure serves its foundational purpose. The critique by Moody’s could help improve itGiven how widely Aadhaar has been hailed as a success in biometric identification to enable policy action, the Moody’s critique of it caught many by surprise. Having highlighted it as a marvel of digital public infrastructure (DPI) at the G20 summit, India’s government was displeased enough to shoot back a rebuttal. It said the credit rating agency had made sweeping assertions against Aadhaar without citing any empirical evidence and had ignored facts about its identity verification options in suggesting that service failures were resulting in wage denial to workers employed under our rural job guarantee scheme. As a debate gets re-ignited, let’s take a closer look at what Moody’s pointed out. Primarily, it noted two problems. First, that this identification system is unsuitable for our hot and humid conditions, which render fingerprint scans prone to failure. Second, it raised concerns over the security of centrally stored data, with the privacy of people seen at risk.
These worries are not baseless and must not be brushed aside. Media reports have pointed to likely starvation deaths in rural India after rations were denied to those who could not be digitally identified. While such reports may be disputed for want of a clear link between human mortality and a system failure, it is obvious that over-reliance on technology can have outcomes that amount to gross injustice if true beneficiaries are turned away. Similarly, it is plainly unfair if daily-wage workers are denied payments only because hard labour blurs their thumb prints and humidity worsens the sensitivity of scanners. The Centre’s response to this point is that alternatives exist. For example, one-time passwords can be used. Moreover, as Aadhaar has people’s iris scans as well, it is not dependent on fingerprints. While this is true, what isn’t clear is the extent to which other methods are being used, especially in far-flung regions where telecom connectivity can be patchy and digital devices dusty. Nor should we overlook the danger of Aadhaar’s massive trove of data, with its matrix of links to other private details of our lives, falling into the wrong hands. Instances of mass leaks have been reported and denied, and although the Aadhaar authority claims adequate levels of cybersecurity, the very existence of such a widely linked database would surely be an attractive target for hackers bent on holding Indians to ransom. Given these privacy perils, there is merit in fortifying Aadhaar further, as Moody’s suggests, perhaps by adopting decentralized mechanisms that could limit the damage caused by any single break-in. Whether a basic architectural shift is feasible would be for technology experts to look into.
Be that as it may, there’s no need to decry the whole Aadhaar system for shortcomings that can technically be fixed. It was designed to provide Indian residents an inalienable digital identity so that welfare benefits could reach properly identified beneficiaries directly, without any transmission loss, and thus help uplift the lives of the needy. To that end, it has worked admirably. Nearly 1.4 billion unique Aadhaar IDs now exist, offering us a DPI foundation for various measures of financial inclusion. Cash transfers under state-run schemes could even be expanded into a universal basic income programme at some point. So long as Aadhaar’s original purpose of unique identification is served, it meets its primary promise of utility. All said, Aadhaar is not perfect. But its apparent imperfections could guide efforts to improve it.
