The government has now, albeit late, recognized the power of the Aadhaar to curb leakages of schemes meant for the poor that continued for years and years together, besides creating one National Identity. To me it is surprising that after demonetisation, people are now up and about protesting the adoption of Aadhaar, a move I can only see as good.
One number that will connect you to everything – your bank account, your income tax filing to even your shopping. India would be the first country where people go to shops, give their Aadhaar number, do their biometric authentication and the money is credited or debited as the case may be. Imagine you will perhaps carry no physical wallet in the future – no credit card, no debit card and no cash!! Just your Aadhaar number.
In fact what prompted me to go out and get a Reliance Jiofi is just this. I go to the Reliance store, give my Aadhaar number, do my biometric and the wifi instrument is in my hand in flat 10 minutes. No exaggeration here. No paperwork, no asking for copies of this and that, filling forms, giving your signatures. Surprisingly we Indians who keep complaining about how tedious everything is, don’t welcome a transition that can only ease our lives.
We have news headlines like this-
Aadhaar marks a fundamental shift in citizen-state relations: From ‘We the People’ to ‘We the Government’. The article states
Since every instance of use of Aadhaar for authentication or for financial transactions leaves behind logs in the Unique Identification Authority of India’s (UIDAI) databases, the government can potentially have very detailed information about everything from your medical purchases to your use of video-chatting software. The space for digital identities as divorced from legal identities gets removed. Clearly, Aadhaar has immense potential for profiling and surveillance.
Besides the article talks of how a person’s fingerprint too can be copied and is not secure as a password.
In this age of digitization and hacking, all our information is anywhere out there in the open. Anything can be insecure. But here we are talking of a government scheme and so I guess it should be more secure. And can we underestimate the tech professional and the man who conceived Aadhaar, that is Nandan Nilekani and his team, to not think through all of this?
People talk of the government having every detail about us. But I compare that to CCTV. One will say how can CCTVs be installed on the roads, in malls, in the housing complex. It is like saying the government will know who I am dating!!!. The government is not going to monitor 1 billion plus people on whether they are buying pizzas or admitting themselves in a private hospital. The data, and I trust the government on this, will be used when they have to monitor financial transactions that don’t seem proper. This hopefully will include corrupt politicians, who open benami bank accounts under which they carry out any amount of financial jugglery, as they know no court can link the accounts to them.
When my friend many years back told me that he sold his beautiful ancestral land in Maharashtra because some politician’s goons were threatening him, as obviously they wanted to usurp all the land, nobody felt scared or that they were living in scary times. But now when things are moving to greater transparency, people are more scared. Is that not absurd? It is today very difficult for citizens to buy land and keep it as real estate investment or then do real farming as you never know when papers change hands and your land is quietly robbed from you.
Then there were the protests about fingerprints and a recent headline to me seemed comic but to most it was scary.
Citizens don't have absolute right over their bodies: Government
The article states-
The Centre told the Supreme Court on Tuesday that citizens could not claim "absolute" right over their body parts and refuse to give digital samples of their fingerprints and iris for Aadhaar enrolment.
When for years the landlord asked the poor to give his angutha chaap or thumb impression on land and loan papers, was that okay? How was that secure? Did not the poor have absolute right over their bodies? I mean what are we making so much fuss about fingerprints becoming mandatory? So when it is mandatory to do a biometric authentication to get visa to go abroad, we don't refuse because we don’t want to miss that lovely holiday in the Bahamas.
Surely there will be security issues about transactions being done only with biometric and with no other password or other details. But being a tech intelligent country, I am sure we will work our way in solving that.
Imagine if we solve most of the security issues, we will be the only country with truly a national identity number that is equally powerful for both the rich and the poor.
Lets hope for the best instead of hoping for the worst.