11087 - It’s Time to Disentangle the Complex Aadhaar Debate - The Wire

So far, erratic and anecdotal research has informed the Aadhaar debate. As a result, a number of concerns have remained insufficiently analysed.

A villager goes through the process of eye scanning for Unique Identification (UID) database system at an enrolment centre in Rajasthan. Credit:Mansi Thapliyal/Reuters/Files

The Aadhaar debate has more often than not resulted in inflexible binary positions without adequate analysis, making it rather difficult for an impartial, lay observer to understand the full implications. The issues have ranged widely from limiting the scope of Aadhaar, to its role in social welfare, to privacy and its threat to democracy. There have been several conspiracy theories and debates on whether Aadhaar has helped welfare or welfare has helped Aadhaar. Many of the above issues have often been conflated in arguments, and, amazingly, the past and the present governments seem to have completely swapped their earlier strident positions on Aadhaar. Given the situation, one does not envy the honourable judges of the Supreme Court who are being urged to expeditiously decide on the pending issues.

Aadhaar is perhaps the most ambitious digital identity project in history. The hurriedly passed Aadhaar Bill has restricted its uses only to an efficient and targeted delivery of services and subsidies, the expenditure for which is incurred from the country’s consolidated fund. Yet the government wants to use it not only to enforce better tax compliance, but also to disburse scholarships, to facilitate hassle-free train and air travel, for payment gateways and even for downloading of survey maps! 

The possibilities of Aadhaar are so enormous that it is inconceivable that its usage can remain limited to preventing leakages in welfare schemes – either the project has to be abandoned altogether or its usage must ultimately grow significantly beyond what is specified in the Aadhaar Act of 2016 or in the court restrictions. Whatever may be the final decision, one can only hope that it will be the outcome of an informed and high quality debate and not be based on strident dogmatic positions.

If we set aside the crucial privacy concerns for the moment, the following appear to be the main issues in deciding on the scope of Aadhaar usage.

First, the government clearly wants to use the unique identification of Aadhaar to enforce compliance in a variety of schemes by avoiding duplicates. As such, making Aadhaar based identity verification mandatory appears to be a strict requirement, and the opponent’s insistence on making Aadhaar optional undermines this very purpose. It does appear that an optional Aadhaar will be severely limited, if not almost useless, in scope. A lot has been written about the requirement of consent in Aadhaar usage. But should individual consent be necessary for every public policy instrument, especially for those whose main purpose is to enforce compliance, provided due processes are followed to make the usage legitimate?

For example, can one refuse to give consent if it is democratically decided that for the greater good, strict identity verification is necessary for employment or for tax compliance or for property registration? Notwithstanding the fact that it will be absolutely correct to argue that getting Aadhaar passed for limited purposes as a money Bill – without adequate debate and then recklessly extending its scope, thereby violating the Supreme Court’s directives – is not exactly what can be called following due processes. The consent and the opt out aspects of the debate appear to have been somewhat trivialised. 

What is perhaps required, at the earliest, is a detailed analysis of who all may have a right to verify the identity of a resident, to what extent, for what purposes and under what circumstances.

Second, why should Aadhaar be restricted to welfare schemes where the cultural capital required for high frequency digital transactions may be lacking? Admittedly there are substantial leakages in these schemes, but surely the need for de-duplication and strict record keeping and audits are as much, if not more, in the domains of tax compliance, real estate transactions and property records and election funding? Why is it that these do not make for more compelling usage possibilities for Aadhaar? Surely, we need some analysis on the relative merits of insisting on unique identification in such domains as well?

Third, detecting duplicates is possibly just one aspect of an instrument like Aadhaar. Its scope can possibly be tremendously enhanced to facilitate linking of local IDs in currently isolated verticals like census, education, health-care and immunisation records, birth and death records, land records, property registration, income tax, banking, loans and defaults, police verification and law enforcement, disaster management, security and intelligence and such others.

Thus, Aadhaar may not only enable efficient design, delivery, monitoring and evaluation of services in each domain individually, but may also offer the possibility of using modern data analytics and machine learning techniques for finding large scale correlations in user data. This, in turn, may facilitate an improved design of social policy strategies, including targeting, and early detection and warning systems for anomalies. For example, it may be tremendously insightful to be able to correlate education levels, family incomes and nutrition across the entire population; or disease spread with income and education. More generally, it may enable macro level analysis from high frequency micro level data, econometric analysis, epidemiological studies, automatic discovery of latent topics and finding both predictive and causal relationships across multiple domains of the economy. There has been very little analysis of such possibilities, either from the government or from independent researchers.