Abstract
Today it is difficult to envisage life in India without an Aadhar number. Shri Ram Sewak Sharma’s leadership has ensured that India shows the world how identity projects are done and other services built on the identity infrastructure. It is truly a ‘Make in India’ story as solutions were designed and implemented in India. Aadhar remains the foundation of a citizen’s empowerment, and the book reiterates that the citizens’ needs are first and foremost.
The book is divided in three sections and eleven chapters. It provides the readers several insights into the remarkable success story of Aadhar, that has withstood many battles and legal scrutiny. The book presents a story of optimism, resilience and deep sense of commitment for improved service delivery. It fascinates the readers about the remarkable possibilities of a paperless digital world to the most marginalised sections of society.
Section I of the book deals with the making of the world’s largest identity infrastructure.
Chapter 1 is titled ‘A Unique Public–Private Partnership’. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was created with an organisational strength of 1,331 posts with a core team of 115 officials, with one Director General and 36 Deputy Director Generals of whom 35 were located in the States and Union Territories. Several distinguished IAS officers served with passion, commitment and drive to make the UIDAI a reality, in addition to officers from other services like Indian Police Service, Institute for Telecommunications Sciences (ITS) and Indian Defence Accounts Service (IDAS). A number of technology team members came from private sector—selection through HR consultants was based on merit. An ecosystem of alliances was forged, as the UIDAI became a melting pot of government, private sector, civil society and academia. The UIDAI was also a huge learning organisation, without rigid hierarchies and divisions to ensure that government and private sector worked together.
Chapter 2 is titled ‘A Random Number by Choice’. The UIDAI decided only to issue a random number and not a card. The decision to issue a random number as Aadhar reduced costs and enabled inclusion of poor. It was smarter than a smart card. Quite unique in conception, the random number of 12 digits could accommodate up to 100 billion numbers. The Aadhar number was not easy to guess and even if the number was available it could not be directly used. Besides Aadhar is for a lifetime, and the number remains with the individual even after death. The UIDAI collected minimal information and the information collected was not used for any other purposes. In many ways the UIDAI became the trusted third party to authenticate identities.
Chapter 3 titled ‘The Fallacy of Technological Impossibility’ deals with the roots of Aadhar, with the Unique ID’s to be given to Below Poverty Line (BPL) families to better manage the benefits and subsidies administered to them through the Department of Information Technology. The Registrar General of India (RGI) was also engaged with the task of creation of National Population Registers (NPRs) and issuance of Multi-purpose National Identity Cards (MNICs) to citizens of India. The UIDAI was constituted in 2009 as an attached office under the aegis of the Planning Commission. The RGI and the UIDAI had a number of differences on the accuracy of the biometrics and use of fingerprints along with iris scans. Finally, the inclusion of an iris scan was left to the UIDAI. There was Parliament opposition to the Identity Bill too. However, by the time the Parliamentary Standing Committee’s report was published in November 2011, the Aadhar had become the world’s largest system in terms of daily processing rate with massive database size. The UIDAI was designed for one million authentications per hour, and it was decided that failure to authenticate should not lead to denial of service. In January 2020, the authentications every month were around a billion. Aadhar became an example for many countries looking to India for replication of their identity programmes.
Chapter 4 titled ‘Innovations on the Go’ deals with the innovations in enrolment and the use of enrolment agencies where payments were based on successful generation of Aadhar for enrolments. Further the use of dual screens, training and certification, using PIN codes to check errors, crowd sourcing for corrections and smart enrolment were used. Post-enrolment innovations included dedicated upload systems and custom secure file transfer protocol system to deliver real time reports. There was emphasis on quality control at the back end with verification of biometric exceptions. The innovations post-Aadhar generation included e-Aadhar and checking duplicate Aadhar issuance.
Section II of the book titled ‘Coalition Against Aadhar’ presents the complex range of legal, institutional and civil society challenges that the Aadhar faced.
Chapter 5 ‘Concern for Right to Privacy’ deals with the immense scrutiny that Aadhar received regarding its impact on the individual’s ‘Right to Privacy’ with several critical articles in leading newspapers and public interest litigations being filed in the Supreme Court of India. The Aadhar was a random number with no intelligence, with minimal data collection, restrictions on data usage and kept residents informed on usage and stringent data sharing policies. Data privacy under the Act is the responsibility of the Authority. The Right to Privacy as a fundamental right was adjudicated by a bench of nine judges and then the Aadhar related petitions were adjudicated by a bench of five judges. The Supreme Court said that Aadhar empowers the marginalised to avail the fruits of government welfare schemes.
Chapter 6 ‘Civil Society’s Punching Bag’ deals with the UIDAI’s engagement with civil society. The civil society’s outreach plan contained twelve rounds of meetings. The critics said that biometrics were unreliable, database insecure, technology was untested and re- duplication not needed. Further civil society said no savings were envisaged and the cost projections of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) that Aadhar costs ₹14,000 crore was dismissed. Civil society organisations maintained that Aadhar is illegal, unnecessary, the ghost beneficiaries were exaggerated and Aadhar implementation could result in the exclusion of beneficiaries and end of welfare schemes. Today, most of the arguments have been unfounded with nearly 50 per cent of poor people using Aadhar to access rations, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) payments, social pensions SIM cards or bank accounts reposing trust in the usage.
Chapter 7 ‘Paranoia About Data Security’ begins with the line, ‘Aadhar touches the most fundamental of human values: our need for an identity’. It addresses the important issue of ‘should Aadhar numbers be published’. In comparison to Aadhar, the Electoral Voter lists and NPR provided a lot more information. Despite this, there was widespread panic that emanated from a story about a Common Service Centre manager selling credentials for ₹500. The author explains that data linking by seeding Aadhar with different data bases is intended to prevent leakages in delivery of subsidies and entitlements by elimination of duplicates. He further emphasises that authentication footprints do not constitute surveillance and disclosure does not increase vulnerability. Several national institutes and the International Telecommunication Union have scrutinised Aadhar and additional security features have been introduced.
Chapter 8 ‘The Struggle Within’ deals with the existential crisis that Aadhar faced. The UIDAI was at loggerheads with the National Advisory Council, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Finance, the Planning Commission and the Parliament. The comments said, ‘You have no authority to do it’; ‘You cannot do it’; and ‘It is not worth doing’. The root of the battle was that the Ministry of Home Affairs was the designated agency to undertake the ID project as the RGI was in the process of creating the NPR. It was only after 100 million citizens were enrolled did the UIDAI receive Ministry of Finance approval. There were issues with the Planning Commission also. The Prime Minister’s support for Aadhar was offered the ray of hope for Aadhar’s survival.
Section III of the book titled ‘Aadhar Comes Alive’ presents the success stories in using Aadhar for delivery of services.
Chapter 9 titled ‘Proof of the Pudding’ says that Aadhar-enabled applications have become absolutely essential to identify and authenticate the persons in India’s digital world. To sign a document in a digital world, to get a copy of the driving licence, to get a utility bill, to make a payment, there are Aadhar-enabled Application Programming Interfaces
The next big step was Digital India, an initiative in which the Prime Minister of India has taken personal interest and appreciated the role technology has played in governance. The Digital Life Certificate—the biometric authentication of pensioners—was also launched. Online registration at hospitals was launched on 1 July 2015. The AIIMS model was replicated in hundreds of other public hospitals since then. Online registration system has one of the largest digital footprints of Digital India projects, and the precursor of the National Digital Health Mission. The Digital Signature Certificates, the secure digital key used to create the signatures was issued by the certifying authorities and has become almost universal in nature. The Digital Locker—private space on public cloud—has over 33 million users and stores 3.7 billion documents.
Chapter 10 titled ‘Convincing the Partners’ deals with the advances made in using the Aadhar platform. The Aadhar-based eKYC was possible because of coordination between UIDAI, Department of Revenue, Financial Inclusion Unit of DFS and RBI. The National Payments Corporation of India has built the Aadhar Payments Bridge (APB) to channelise government benefits and subsidies to rightful hands. Soon thereafter the linking of Aadhar to bank accounts became a reality and both MGNREGA payments and the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) benefits could be transferred to bank accounts using the Aadhar Payments Bridge. Today not only the RBI but also the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA), the Pension Fund Regulatory & Development Authority (PFRDA) and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) have adopted Aadhar for their services. In 2016, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and Department of Telecommunication (DOT) permitted Aadhar-based eKYC for acquiring new subscribers. States adopted Aadhar-based service delivery systems with Andhra Pradesh being among the first state to demonstrate the efficacy of Aadhar for PDS/pension/ MGNREGA disbursement. The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (MOP&NG) successfully adopted Aadhar for LPG subsidy and the scheme was implemented in 291 districts of India.
Chapter 11 ‘JAM and Other Recipes’ deals with transparency in PDS transactions, the birth of Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhar and Mobile (JAM) and the uses of JAM. The development of India Stack has enabled many paperless and cashless services to be delivered to India’s citizens. The 2015 Economic Survey supported the JAM trinity solution to ensure targeted delivery of subsidies for PDS, kerosene subsidies. The government’s move towards Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) has enabled huge transfers of money using Aadhar seeded digital platforms. The benefits using Aadhar have been quantified as ₹90,000 crore every year, resulting from the massive improvements witnessed in targeted deliveries.
Shri Ram Sewak Sharma has been a tireless crusader for Aadhar. He has fought a number of internal consensus building battles that needed to be fought and won and established the resilience of Aadhar, ensuring that it found universal acceptability. It can be said that Aadhar and post-Aadhar solutions have impacted the lives of ordinary citizens making processes simpler. Aadhar has ensured that ghosts and imposters have been eliminated from the system. The breadth of Aadhar-based service deliveries will only increase in the coming years. The impact has already been breathtaking.
The book makes an interesting reading.