Aadhaar Roundup

The Aadhaar-UID project has crossed several hurdles in the past few months. The second anniversary of Aadhaar project launch saw launching of the aadhaar linked payment services from Dudu, Rajasthan. The second phase of the project is under way and enrollments have restarted now(Sept,2012) after they were stopped since February,2012 when UIDAI decided to take a break and refresh their strategy. There are several issues with the project that are discussed in the media and here is my take on some of them. I have given links to articles that i am speaking about wherever possible.

Facebook Id as a National Identifier

President Barrack Obama addressed the Indian parliament joint session and one brief remark he made was with respect to the Aadhaar project. People would have easily thought of that as any other matter. It is interesting to know what Obama thinks of the Aadhaar project. He even visited an enrolment centre. Upon return to US and at some other occasion, the US govt has made it clear that it would not get into the business of identity. US conducts punishing checks at airports and has a biometric database of all visitors of foreign origin. Instead of conducting thorough checks at airports it might be cheaper to invest in finding out who that traveller is. This investment in knowing about air travellers might pay for itself with an insider’s view of a person’s locations, travel patterns and life. People of USA despise any such effort at tracking and are very sensitive of their privacy.

US govt. is going ahead in its program for National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace(NSTIC)(Read More..). There are noises from people to make facebook account of people an official identifier for identification purposes. This innovative idea has not been thought about in India. What would have been the result had it been mandated that every citizen create an account in an official website of the government and keep their updated demographic (profile) info before enrollment. How would the program have developed? I feel the power of social networking could have been utilized in creating a mega citizen centric portal designed by the best brains in the IT world.

What may not work in US might work in India

Railways are interested in knowing the identity of people it carries. Airlines too may one day ask for the aadhaar number of travellers it carries. It would simplify matters if airlines collect this bit of information as it would simplify many things associated with law such as accurate identification of air travellers, taking punitive action against smugglers or customs evaders etc. An interesting point I observed in foreign media is a mention that in India where sometimes people live something like five in a room, concepts of privacy are unkown(Read more..). Here people might agree to prove who they are by authenticating without any worries of being tracked.

Things could have been better

The Aadhaar rollout has suffered several avoidable pitfalls if only it was better managed. There are reports of inexistent or fake people availing of Aadhaar number such as in the name of coriander s/o pulav. Aadhaar letters have been returned due to non-existent addresses. This is the result of enrolling economically weaker sections. If Aadhaar was rolled out for the economically well to do at least this problem of non-existent addresses and fake names could have been avoided with stringent identity checks. What could have been done was simply to mandate all bank account holders to compulsorily enrol for Aadhaar numbers. This might have hit several birds with a single stone.

Recently there have been noises from civil society to rid the country of black money. If all bank accounts are linked with the unique Aadhaar number it would have solved the problem of benami accounts in a short span of time. Secondly these rich classes are less likely to be unruly while standing in queues and more likely to book their enrolment appointment in advance. They might also be less likely to give out untraceable addresses.

Since, 20-30% of the citizens have bank accounts and some of these people would also have PAN numbers then, linking PAN numbers with Aadhaar would immediately solve the problem of multiple PAN numbers with a person. Aadhaar scheme is suffering from lack of immediate and evident results. Atleast some of it could have been avoided if the scheme was rolled out among the rich first. This initial rollout could have been done with help exclusively from banks only.

Once this category of people were enrolled it would have made sense, to then strengthen the post office network of 1,20,000 branches by linking them with core banking along with 40,000 rural branches of scheduled banks, in reaching out to the remaining unbanked sections. Some solution for dispatch of aadhaar letters was needed. Postmen are scratching their heads over (Travelling Salesman problem) delivering letters when they arrive by the dozen each located quite a distance from others. We have to remember that the aadhaar project is essentially a banking related innovation.

Some have suggested that UIDAI could have focussed on one or a handful of districts and experimented with various approaches to provide benefits to citizens. The early lessons learnt from such a saturation of aadhaar applications would have helped in making better decisions such as whether to go for offline smart cards or online biometric authentication.

There is unnecessary clamour among the wealthy to enrol for aadhaar. This seems to be unnecessary as the scheme is meant for the poor and they should be the first ones to enrol. This situation has arisen partly because of incompetent bureaucrats who have announced that aadhaar project will have an end. Enrolling the poor appears to me to be the present strategy. It is obvious that the govt. has 2014 elections in mind when it is speeding up the aadhaar enrolment and cash transfer schemes.

Some of the beneficiaries in kotkasim of alwar district, Rajasthan it seems have not received the expected cash in their accounts. Among those who have received cash the complaint seems to be that payments are irregular. Among people who have tried withdrawing small amounts from bank branches the complaint is that they are ill-treated due to their backwardness and have to visit banks frequently to check if money has arrived in their accounts. Clearly Banking Correspondents are missing in this district.

During initial phases of implementation of the project it was decided not to issue a card. Now Finance minister has sanctioned budget for the RIC. If a card was supposed to be given then on completion of enrollment itself a card could have been issued, loaded with encrypted biometric information. Ofcourse the Unique Identification Number would be needed to be generated after De-Duplication. This number could have been written into the card at a later date. This would make the card immediately usable esp in banking applications like operating of a Micro-ATM, and there was no need of waiting for aadhaar number generation.

Enrolments

UIDAI should be given permission to enrol the entire population for demographic and biometric information. Once UIDAI completes the task the NPR should enrol citizens for only collecting the other fields that the UIDAI did not collect. Once the Local registry of Usual Residents (LRUR) is created and public debate initiated as to who all are citizens those among Aadhaar card holders who are found to be non citizens should be made ineligible to get government benefits. This process of tagging non citizens might be politically sensitive and might cause lot of conflicts.The UID-NPR Debate(Read more..)

Will the tap be turned fully on

With aadhaar project the govt can potentially ruin its finances in trying to provide more resources for the poor. If citizens get benefits more efficiently the govt. might instead of spending less and benefiting the same number of citizens might try and turn the tap fully and include more and more people in the benefit schemes. The govt. is eying the 2014 elections and observers are commenting that this scheme is not different from bribing the voters.(Read more..)

With aadhaar consumers can be protected

Recently consumer protection organizations have come out in support of the project. They see potential in tracking sales of medicines to consumers. This they feel gives the consumer a way to prove that such a sale had indeed been made (If the consumer has paid through card linked with aadhaar no). The primary purpose of aadhaar project has been to have better accountability in sales of items sold in ration shops. This accountability need not be limited to sales through fair price shops only and can be used to track transactions at any merchant establishment.(Read More..)

Who is the originator of the aadhaar project in the ministry of information technology?

According to the documents in the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) website (http://uidai.gov.in) aadhaar project was conceived in the ministry of IT sometime in Feb, 2006. Then in June, 2006 the proposal to create the UIDAI was put forward. Many think that Aadhaar project is an evolved form of MNIC project of the BJP but that project did not have any provision for collecting biometrics. There are no accounts of anyone championing the cause of collecting biometrics and generating a unique identification number. If no one came up with the idea (In the ministry of IT) then from where did it originate? There might even be a remote possibility of the project being conceived in some foreign country. The NATGRID chief recently went on a pilgrimage to the CIA head quarters. Nandan Nilekani too has strong links within the biometric industry in the US.

Iris too to be used for Auth

Iris based authentication will increase successful auth rate to 97% or higher but there might be problems such as easier theft of iris image. It is much easier to stealthily take iris images than collecting fingerprints. The recent mysore study shows that authentication accuracy can be as high as 99.2%. The pilot study after giving feedback to the biometric industry hopes to achieve an accuracy of 99.5% (Successful authentication percentage).(Read More..)

Hybrid Approach should be adopted

The home ministry under Mr. P. Chidambaram had taken a view that authentication under aadhaar should be through a card and offline. They believe the mobile network would not spread to remote villages.

A hybrid approach of offline and online authentication looks to be an ideal solution. The home ministry wishes to give every resident a Resident India Card with 64kb memory which can store fingerprint images of two fingers. It hopes to make use of this card with aadhaar number embedded in it to provide a host of welfare services similar to mykad cards in malaysia. If aadhaar auth migrates to iris recognition the RIC will be useless as it does not have provision for iris feature storage.

Obviate Auth

Authentication is not so much necessary in PDS or LPG distribution. What is important is to have an electronic record of a customer requirement. UIDAI seems to be working on a process of order taking for PDS where IVR is used to take customer requirements. Once an electronic record of a family’s requirement of goods is logged, authentication while purchasing goods seems to be unnecessary. All that is needed is to service the request and the FPS owner just has to mark the requirement as serviced.

There is a possibility of corruption here when an aadhaar holder orders goods over phone and colludes with the FPS owner to allocate the grains to him without paying anything and then gets the subsidy benefit into his account. The FPS owner now is free to sell the goods in the open market. FPS owner does not gain anything. A possibility where an aadhaar holder who has intimated his requirement over phone is denied grains and grains meant for him are then sold in open market and record updated that the requirement was serviced then the customer gets benefits in his account but not the grains. FPS owner does not gain anything here.

If in case subsidy is credited into account of FPS owners instead of customers account there are again two possibilities. A customer colludes with the FPS owner raises a requirement and does not come to purchase the goods. The FPS owner updates the requirement as serviced pockets his share of benefits and sells the grains in the open market. Here the FPS owner gains considerably. Another instance where a customer raises a requirement and is denied the goods due to some reasons and subsequently the record updated as being serviced the FPS owner is again gaining both the benefits as well as the full cost of grains.

Hence in both the cases it is clear why FPS owners are opposing direct cash transfers to customers accounts and lobbying for getting benefits into their accounts only. It is noteworthy to note that we have avoided authentication.

UID linked temporary accounts

This might come up as a requirement when during enrolment a citizen has not mentioned his account but there comes a point when he becomes eligible for benefits. It is necessary to create dynamically an account which will hold money until such time that the UID holder does not link his actual bank account with that UID number.

Another Myth

There are several myths surrounding the project and some of them are proved unfounded here.

I recently met a friend who has already enrolled for Aadhaar. He was in great hurry to do so since he thinks that the earlier you enrol the lesser the chances of rejection and the later you enrol more the chances of duplicate being found due to larger number of biometric comparisons and number generation rejected. Read a list of Myths debunked Here.

References:

[1] Frances Zelazny. 2012. “The Evolution of India’s UID Program: Lessons Learned and Implications for Other Developing Countries.” CGD Policy Paper 008. Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development. http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1426371