WHY IS THE CHURCH SUPPORTING AADHAR CARDS WHEN EVEN WINGS OF THE GOVERNMENT THINK IT IS TRASH, OR DANGEROUS

[Dr. John Dayal]

JOHN DAYAL

I live in what is called a Cooperative Housing Society flat in East
Delhi, among the fortunate few among the middle classes who could get
to own a flat in Delhi thanks to the cooperative movement and a
cooperative Delhi government in the late Seventies. Unlike DDA flats,
life in such a society, even if one lives on the sixth floor, has a
sense of community about it. Residents of all 57 flats in our case,
former journalists and media employees from all parts of India, get
quite animated about social issues, national crises and above all, on
municipal issues much as members of any Residents Welfare Association
would do. This week, our RWA and its members had their moment of
excitement when a private sector group came to make the government
Aadhar cards, or Unique Identification cards.

Although I have been writing and campaigning against this UIDAI
[Unique Identification Authority of India] scheme for a long time –
for reasons which I will explain in a short while – my wife, like me a
senior citizen, thought it would be good for us if we too got
ourselves a card, in addition to the driving license, the ration card,
the Income tax number, the several passports, and multiple Identity
papers that we carry. As a loyal wife, she eventually did not go to
get herself photographed, her iris measured, her thumb prints taken
and her bio data punched in by a man who cannot spell Mary [not my
wife’s name]. But she does harbour a feeling that we are going to miss
this card at some future date. Patently, I am a bad campaigner where
my family is concerned.

I was, however, really surprised when a neighbour, a senior
journalist, a former member of the Communist Party and a scholar of
some reckoning met me in the lift. He was going to get his UID card
made. I knew him to be a campaigner against such government floppies.
“I am opposed to the UID”, he told me. ”I am getting this card made
just in case the government denies us some privileges if we do not
have such a card.” An ID card, meant to be a beneficial thing, had
quite clearly evolved a tinge of the coercive.

My neighbour is an individual and took his own decision, without the
prompting of the Communist party or anyone else.

But why is the church canvassing for the UIDAI? In my travels across
the length and breadth of this country, I have fund Bishops and Parish
priests, Pastors and their administrators pumping for the card,
without really understanding or being able to explain why they think
the cards are important. The only conclusion one reaches is that the
Christian leadership has an innate trust in the government of the day,
and honestly believes that the government cannot do any wrong. It
sides with a few popular movements – such as the middle class angst of
Hazare and his team, but of course not the peasantry anger which
results in Maoists or the Dalit Panthers of yore.

Actually, the UID card is a costly joke, possibly even dangerous in
the long run. The United Kingdom has it for a brief period, and
expeditiously gave it up when the populace objected to breach of
privacy and security of data issues.

Inaugurating Aadhar on 29, September 2009 in Tembhli Village in
Maharashtra, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the project the
‘face of modern India’. To Nandan Nilekani, the billionaire co-founder
of IT giant Infosys and Chairman of UIDAI with the rank of a Union
minister, the project is the foundation for future development of the
nation.

Almost immediately, critics called it ominous. “The fact that, a
project of this magnitude was implemented without even the basic
formalities needed and an enabling law is a matter of utmost concern.
How can a government approve a sum over Rs. 3000 crores for a dubious
project, without a benefit analysis study and the approval of the
parliament? The only possible reason behind the undue haste in
implementing the project is the business interests involved,” a critic
said. “The social, economic, political and ethical impacts of the
project are of frightening scale. And well mark the beginning of the
end of democracy in India.”

Time therefore to bring the Church face to face with the UID reality,
because the issues are important, valid and will impact on the church
and the community in the long run. Experts, and the Standing Committee
of Parliament on Finance, which examined this scheme have said so.

Citing “contradictions and ambiguities within the government” over the
implementation of the UID, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on
Finance rejected the National Identification Authority Bill and asked
the government to bring a fresh legislation. The panel also suggested
to the government to “reconsider and review the UID scheme”. The
committee headed by senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha said the scheme
“is riddled with serious lacunae.” It said the scheme had been
“conceptualised with no clarity of purpose” and was “being implemented
in a directionless way with a lot of confusion”. The committee pointed
out that initially meant for BPL families, the scheme had been
extended to all residents of India and certain other persons.

The Empowered Group of Ministers set up for collating the UID and
National Population Register (NPR) had “failed to take concrete
decision on important issues”. These include “(a) identifying the
focussed purpose of the resident identity database; (b) methodology of
data collection; (c) removing the overlapping between the UID scheme
and NPR; (d) conferring of statutory authority to the UIDAI since its
inception; (e) structure and functioning of the UIDAI; (f) entrusting
data collection and issue of unique identity number and national
identification number to a single authority instead of the present
UIDAI and its reconciliation with National Registration Authority”,
the committee said.

It noted the possibility of misuse of information in the huge data
base. “It would be difficult to deal with the issues of access and
misuse of personal information, surveillance, profiling, linking and
matching of data bases and security confidentiality of information” in
the absence of a data protection legislation.

Sure enough, the scheme soon got its first data misuse. The Press
trust of India reported on 3 October 2011 a complaint regarding misuse
of address proof, admitted by the authorities in reply to an RTI
query. However, it did not give details of the complaint, received
this year, and the complainant.

Writing in the Hindu on December 16, 2011 analyst R Ramkumar said the
government should pay heed to the parliamentary standing committee's
views and suspend the Aadhar project. It would be a travesty to push
the project in through the backdoor. He explained that the
parliamentary committee does not just reject the Bill; it also raises
serious questions about the idea of Aadhar itself. In fact, the report
so comprehensively questions the idea that any effort to introduce
fresh legislation would require, as a prerequisite, a re-look at the
foundational principles on which the project was conceived.

Ramkumar listed five important arguments in the parliamentary report.
First, it contains scathing criticism of the government for beginning
Aadhar enrolment without Parliament's approval. Secondly, it
questioned about the enrolment process followed for Aadhar numbers
which, it said was “riddled with serious lacunae, with no clarity of
purpose.” The report concludes that the enrolment process “compromises
the security and confidentiality of information of Aadhar number
holders,” and has “far reaching consequences for national security.”
The reason: “the possibility of possession of Aadhar numbers by
illegal residents through false affidavits/introducer system.
“Thirdly, the government had not enacted a “national data protection
law,” which is a “pre-requisite for any law that deals with large-
scale collection of information from individuals and its linkages
across separate databases. Fourthly, the report strongly disapproves
of “the hasty manner” in which the project was cleared. isting ID
documents are also not available.” And last, the report tears apart
the faith placed on biometrics to prove the unique identity of
individuals. The report concludes that, given the limitations of
biometrics, “it is unlikely that the proposed objectives of the UID
scheme could be achieved.”

Law researcher and civil society activist Dr. Usha Ramanathan, the
nation’s top expert on the subject, says the UID project is an
experiment – not a solution.

She said while recognizing that biometrics is "sensitive information",
the agency has washed its hands of responsibility for the safety,
security and confidentiality of the data during enrolment and passed
the buck to the registrars. In Mumbai women were unable to enroll
because of blisters and calluses and the effect of abrasive detergents
on their hands. In Bangalore and Delhi that senior citizens were
unable to get enrolled because their fingerprints did not work. The
credibility roadblocks that these reports were setting up were sought
to be removed by the UIDAI by threatening enrollers with "action" if
they turned any person away. Questions have arisen about persons with
disabilities, some of whom may not have fingerprints or irises that
meet the biometric standards required by the UIDAI for enrolment. In
Pune, a man received his UID with his wife's photograph appended to
it.

The US magazine The New Yorker describes how this embarrassment is
sought to be averted: a computer operator sits in an office running
through enrolment forms to make a cursory judgment whether the image
matches the demographic information. "That day," the journalist
reports, "he had already inspected more than 5,000 photographs, and he
had clicked "incorrect" 300 times: men listed as women, children as
adults, photographs with two heads in them." It seems there are
infinite variations to the theme of error.

In May, "unidentified persons" walked away with two laptops and a pen
drive which held data pertaining to 140 persons from an enrolment
centre in a school in Hadaspur, Maharashtra. The back-up information
was also on the same laptop. The data included "sensitive details"
relating to passports, voter ID cards, bank accounts, photographs and
a range of other information. In July, five persons were arrested in
Bangalore for issuing fake UID. The UIDAI heard about the racket when
they were approached with complaints that "Global ID Solutions" was
selling franchises to customers to take up Aadhar enrolment for a non-
refundable fee of Rs. 2.5 lakh an enrolment kit. This episode exposed
the perils of indiscriminate outsourcing. In October, a software error
resulted in hundreds of residents of Colaba in south Mumbai having
their addresses recorded as Kolaba, Raigarh district. The enrollers
claimed that this was a software glitch and that enrolees would just
have to return another day to re-enrol. Only, the guidelines of the
UIDAI do not have a provision for re-enrolling any resident.

Dr. Ramanathan says “This is no innocent data collection in a vacuum.
Set amidst NATGRID and UID, it conjures Orwellian images of Big
Brother. The relationship between the state and the people is set to
change dramatically, and irretrievably, and it appears to be happening
without even a discussion about what it means. The National Population
Register has been launched countrywide, after an initial foray in the
coastal belt. All persons in India aged over 15 years are to be loaded
on to a database. This will hold not just their names and the names of
their parents, sex, date of birth, place of birth, present and
permanent address, marital status – and “if ever married, name of
spouse” – but also their biometric identification, which would include
a photograph and all eight fingers and two thumbs imprinted on it.
This is being spoken of with awe, as the ‘biggest-ever' census
exercise in history. 1.2 billion people are to be brought on to this
database before the exercise is done. This could well be a marvel
without parallel. But what will this exercise really do?

Dr. Ramanathan cautions it is wise not to forget that this is not data
collection in a vacuum. It is set amidst NATGRID (National
Intelligence Grid), the UID and a still-hazy-but-waiting-in-the-wings
DNA Bank. Each of these has been given spurs by the Union Home
Ministry, with security as the logic for surveillance and tracking by
the state and its agencies. The benign promise of targeted welfare
services is held out to legitimise this exercise.

She says if the Home Ministry were to have its way, NATGRID will
enable 11 security and intelligence agencies, including RAW, the IB,
the Enforcement Directorate, the National Investigation Agency, the
CBI, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and the Narcotics Control
Bureau and other secret services, to access consolidated data from 21
categories of databases. These would include railway and air travel,
income tax, phone calls, bank account details, credit card
transactions, visa and immigration records, property records, and the
driving licences of citizens.

It is the admitted position that the information gathered in the house-
to-house survey, and the biometrics collected during the exercise,
will feed into the UID database. The UID document says the information
that data base will hold will only serve to identify if the person is
who the person says he, or she, is. It will not hold any personal
details about anybody. What the document does not say is that it will
provide the bridge between the ‘silos' of data that are already in
existence, and which the NPR will also bring into being. So with the
UID as the key the profile of any person resident in India can be
built up.

Why is a problem? Dr. Ramanathan answers “Because privacy will be
breached. Because it gives room for abuse of the power that the holder
of this information acquires. Because the information never goes away,
even when life moves on. So if a person is dyslexic some time in life,
is a troubled adolescent, has taken psychiatric help at some stage in
life, was married but is now divorced and wants to leave that behind
in the past, was insolvent till luck and hard work produced different
results, donated to a cause that is to be kept private — all of this
is an open book, forever, to the agency that has access to the data
base. And, there are some like me who would consider it demeaning to
have this relationship with the state. For the poor, who often live on
the margins of life and legality, it could provide the badge of
potential criminality in a polity where ostensible poverty has been
considered a sign of dangerousness. (This is not hyperbole; read the
beggary laws, and the attitude of some courts reflected in the comment
that `giving land for resettlement to an encroacher is like rewarding
a pickpocket.')”

“Also, the Citizenship Rules cast every ‘individual' and every ‘head
of family' in the role of an ‘informant' who may be subjected to
penalties if he does not ensure that every person gets on to the NPR,
and keeps information about themselves and their ‘dependents' updated.
There isn't even an attempt at speaking in the language of democracy!”
Dr. Ramanathan points out.

Concerned with these issues, eminent persons led by former Kerala Law
minister and retired Supreme Court justice VR Krishna Iyer demanded in
a joint statement, that the UID project be halted, a feasibility study
be done covering all aspects of this issue, experts be tasked with
studying its constitutionality, the law on privacy be urgently worked
on, a cost- benefit analysis be done and a public, informed debate be
conducted before any such major change be brought in.

We should await such an exercise before so enthusiastically
encouraging innocent parishioners to get their fingerprints and eyes
scanned.