Breather for Aadhaar

But there's work still to be done

The government’s decision to geographically split India between two contending registry projects — the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and the National Population Register (NPR) — is intended to save on the wastage that would result from duplicate data collection. Now they will use each other’s data, though duplication cannot be entirely avoided – as P Chidambaram, the Union home minister, has pointed out. He has, however, backed the new turf-sharing arrangement by arguing that 5-6 per cent duplication — 60-75 million people — is not high for a country as big as India. What is sensible is the adoption, conscious or otherwise, of the Chinese practice of allowing different parts of the country to pursue different initiatives. Then, as emerging models or programmes get their act together, in time the Central authorities have no difficulty in adopting for the whole country the ones that deliver better.

What is sometimes lost in the debate between the two endeavours is that they are completely different animals. The NPR is national security-driven. It was conceived by the then BJP-led government after the attack on Parliament in 2001, as a registry of citizens that would help the state ferret out non-citizens and the security risk it was believed they represented. It involves not just household visits, but “social” verification and the filling of 15 data fields. The UIDAI’s approach, on the other hand, is utilitarian and elegantly stripped-down: It is to identify the people who are ordinarily resident, so that social benefits can be paid directly to poor people, thus eliminating the leakage that happens through impersonation and duplication. UIDAI collects data for five fields through registrars like nationalised banks and the Life Insurance Corporation, and does not pay household visits. This process was viewed as essentially unsecured by the home ministry, the location of the NPR project. The home ministry’s argument has only limited validity. The idea behind the UID is both inclusiveness and transparency in targeting; in order to achieve such goals, onerous identity validation requirements cannot be put in place. The UIDAI has promised to “review” the security aspects of its registration, but hopefully the essential simplicity of the process will not be compromised.

The cloud over the UID is, however, not fully gone. The relevant parliamentary standing committee has unanimously rejected the draft legislation to give statutory status to UIDAI. While it can continue on the basis of executive authority, failure to acquire statutory status will undermine the legitimacy of the whole idea. The committee’s report was a mish-mash of objections from both left and right. While iterating the home ministry’s security-related objections, the committee also repeated the objections from many civil society activists to comprehensive data bases on citizens per se — that these pose privacy hazards, and are open to misuse. These concerns have caused some governments in the West to recently end similar projects. Rather than cancelling the UID project, however, it is clear that it is necessary to have a privacy law and regime in place.