[The poor must scan their fingerprints at the ration shop to get their government allocations of rice. Retirees must do the same to get their pensions. Middle-school students cannot enter the water department’s annual painting contest until they submit their identification.]
By Vindu Goel
 |
|
India
has collected biometric data on most of its 1.3 billion residents, to be used
in
a
nationwide identity system called Aadhaar, meaning “foundation.”
Credit
The New York Times
|
NEW
DELHI — Seeking to build an
identification system of unprecedented scope, India is scanning the
fingerprints, eyes and faces of its 1.3 billion residents and connecting the
data to everything from welfare benefits to mobile phones.
Civil libertarians are horrified, viewing the
program, called Aadhaar, as Orwell’s Big Brother brought to life. To the
government, it’s more like “big brother,” a term of endearment used by many
Indians to address a stranger when asking for help.
For other countries, the technology could
provide a model for how to track their residents. And for India’s top court,
the ID system presents unique legal issues that will define what the
constitutional right to privacy means in the digital age.
To Adita Jha, Aadhaar was simply a hassle.
The 30-year-old environmental consultant in Delhi waited in line three times to
sit in front of a computer that photographed her face, captured her
fingerprints and snapped images of her irises. Three times, the data failed to
upload. The fourth attempt finally worked, and she has now been added to the
1.1 billion Indians already included in the program.
Ms. Jha had little choice but to keep at it.
The government has made registration mandatory for hundreds of public services
and many private ones, from taking school exams to opening bank accounts.
“You almost feel like life is going to stop
without an Aadhaar,” Ms. Jha said.
Technology has given governments around the
world new tools to monitor their citizens. In China, the government is rolling
out ways to use facial recognition and big data to track people, aiming to
inject itself further into everyday life. Many countries, including Britain,
deploy closed-circuit cameras to monitor their populations.
But India’s program is in a league of its
own, both in the mass collection of biometric data and in the attempt to link
it to everything — traffic tickets, bank accounts, pensions, even meals for
undernourished schoolchildren.
“No one has approached that scale and that
ambition,” said Jacqueline Bhabha, a professor and research director of
Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, who has studied biometric ID
systems around the world. “It has been hailed, and justifiably so, as an
extraordinary triumph to get everyone registered.”
Critics fear that the government will gain
unprecedented insight into the lives of all Indians.
In response, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and
other champions of the program say that Aadhaar is India’s ticket to the
future, a universal, easy-to-use ID that will reduce this country’s endemic
corruption and help bring even the most illiterate into the digital age.
“It’s the equivalent of building interstate
highways,” said Nandan Nilekani, the technology billionaire who was tapped by
the government in 2009 to build the Aadhaar system. “If the government invested
in building a digital public utility and that is made available as a platform,
then you actually can create major innovations around that.”
The potential uses — from surveillance to
managing government benefit programs — have drawn interest elsewhere. Sri Lanka
is planning a similar system, and Britain, Russia and the Philippines are
studying it, according to the Indian government.
Aadhaar, which means “foundation” in English,
was initially intended as a difficult-to-forge ID to reduce fraud and improve
the delivery of government welfare programs.
But Mr. Modi, who has promoted a “digital
India” vision since his party took power in 2014, has vastly expanded its
ambitions.
The poor must scan their fingerprints at the
ration shop to get their government allocations of rice. Retirees must do the
same to get their pensions. Middle-school students cannot enter the water
department’s annual painting contest until they submit their identification.
In some cities, newborns cannot leave the
hospital until their parents sign them up. Even leprosy patients, whose illness
damages their fingers and eyes, have been told they must pass fingerprint or
iris scans to get their benefits.
The Modi government has also ordered Indians
to link their IDs to their cellphone and bank accounts. States have added their
own twists, like using the data to map where people live. Some employers use
the ID for background checks on job applicants.
“Aadhaar has added great strength to India’s
development,” Mr. Modi said in a January speech to military cadets. Officials
estimate that taxpayers have saved at least $9.4 billion from Aadhaar by
weeding out “ghosts” and other improper beneficiaries of government services.
Opponents have filed at least 30 cases
against the program in India’s Supreme Court. They argue that Aadhaar violates
India’s Constitution — and, in particular, a unanimous court decision last year
that declared for the first time that Indians had a fundamental right to
privacy.
Rahul Narayan, one of the lawyers challenging
the system, said the government was essentially building one giant database on
its citizens. “There has been a sort of mission creep to it all along,” he
said.
The court has been holding extensive hearings
and is expected to make a ruling in the spring.
The government argues that the universal ID
is vital in a country where hundreds of millions of people do not have widely
accepted identification documents.
“The people themselves are the biggest
beneficiaries,” said Ajay B. Pandey, the Minnesota-trained engineer who leads
the Unique Identification Authority of India, the government agency that
oversees the system. “This identity cannot be refused.”
Businesses are also using the technology to
streamline transactions.
Banks once sent employees to the homes of
account applicants to verify their addresses. Now, accounts can be opened
online and finished with a fingerprint scan at a branch or other authorized
outlet. Reliance Jio, a telecom provider, relies on an Aadhaar fingerprint scan
to conduct the government-mandated ID check for purchases of cellphone SIM
cards. That allows clerks to activate service immediately instead of forcing
buyers to wait a day or two.
But the Aadhar system has also raised
practical and legal issues.
Although the system’s core fingerprint, iris
and face database appears to have remained secure, at least 210 government
websites have leaked other personal data — such as name, birth date, address,
parents’ names, bank account number and Aadhaar number — for millions of
Indians. Some of that data is still available with a simple Google search.
As Aadhaar has become mandatory for government
benefits, parts of rural India have struggled with the internet connections
necessary to make Aadhaar work. After a lifetime of manual labor, many Indians
also have no readable prints, making authentication difficult. One recent study
found that 20 percent of the households in Jharkand state had failed to get
their food rations under Aadhaar-based verification — five times the failure
rate of ration cards.
“This is the population that is being passed
off as ghosts and bogus by the government,” said Reetika Khera, an associate
professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, who
co-wrote the study.
Seeing these problems, some local governments
have scaled back the use of Aadhaar for public benefits. In February, the
government for the Delhi region announced that it would stop using Aadhaar to
deliver food benefits.
Dr. Pandey said that some problems were
inevitable but that his agency was trying to fix them. The government is
patching security holes and recently added face recognition as an alternative
to fingerprint or iris scans to make it easier to verify identities.
Fears that the Indian government could use
Aadhaar to turn the country into a surveillance state, he said, are overblown.
“There is no central authority that has all the information,” he said.
Before Aadhaar, he said, hundreds of millions
of Indians could not easily prove who they were.
“If you are not able to prove your identity,
you are disenfranchised,” he said. “You have no existence.”
Suhasini Raj contributed reporting.
Follow Vindu Goel on Twitter: @vindugoel.
