295 - 759 - What This Criticism of UID Reveals - The Acorn

10.21.2010 · Posted in Economy, Public Policy
To oppose the UID project on the grounds that it makes government services efficient is bizarre

Over in the op-ed pages of The Hindu there’s a surreal op-ed by R Ramakumar that argues that Aadhaar, India’s new Unique Identification (UID) project will lead to an invasive state security-wise and a retreating one development-wise. Now reasonable people can debate whether or not UID will lead to these outcomes, and whether these outcomes are desirable or not. But reasonable people cannot argue that the government must spend money indiscriminately. That, however, is exactly what Mr Ramakumar argues! The UID project, he alleges aims “to keep benefits restricted to the so-called “targeted” sections, ensure targeting with precision and thereby, limit the government’s expenditure commitments.”

How will UID lead to human rights violations? Mr Ramakumar’s argument is “Because Amartya Sen says so.” Appealing to authority is not quite the most persuasive way to make such an argument. The fact that the UID is not compulsory and the fact more than 500 million Indians have mobile phones—it’ll takes years before that many people get their Aadhaar—that are already capable of being tracked and profiled is ignored.

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255 - Aadhaar and the myth of lack of identity - Money Life

October 05, 2010 08:19 PM
Samir Kelekar
 

What is needed today to solve the problems of the poor is not so much esoteric technology but first and foremost clear logic as to where the problems lie. Most poor get deprived of what they should get because of corruption, and not lack of identity

The UID programme has been launched without any legal and constitutional sanction for it as yet. In the name of the poor, a huge amount of money is being spent.

And, in spite of severe criticism from rights organisations including warnings by eminent academicians such as Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, no action of reviewing the project has been taken.

The main argument of the UID that it will help plug leakages in NREGA and PDS is fallacious.
Consider these two videos from the ground:

1) MREGA corruption video
http://indiaunheard.videovolunteers.org/ajeet/rural-workersdenied-wages/

2) Villagers expose corrupt dealer http://indiaunheard.videovolunteers.org/varsha/villagers-exposecorrupt-pds-dealer/

The first video shows how the supervisor who is in charge of the NREGA programme takes a bribe to mark the attendance of the workers.

It is not that the workers don't have a form of identification. They do have a job card. Their work does not fetch them anything unless their attendance is marked, and for that they have to depend on the supervisor. And the supervisor asks a bribe for it. UID or for that matter no amount of identification can solve this problem.

Consider the second video which is about PDS. Here the ration shop owner charges more money for the grain. Here too, lack of identification is not the problem, and hence UID will be of no good to solve this problem.

If one goes by estimates done by various sources, the leakage in the government schemes due to fake cards is about 8% to 10% - a miniscule part of the whole lot of leakages. In the case of PDS for instance, most leakages do not take place at the last mile as per the UIDAI hypothesis; instead it is the big corrupt sharks who are involved in siphoning grains before they reach the ration shop itself.

Thus, it is clear that not enough study is conducted by UIDAI in concluding that lack of identification is the real problem. No wonder, there was no independent impact assessment study of what the UIDAI project can lead to, which if done, the above problems would have been revealed. This begs the question - is the amount to be spent on UIDAI in the name of plugging of leakage of government aid justified?

A cost-benefit analysis would have given the right answers.

Jean Dreze, who conceived NREGA, has said that the UID project is a security project camouflaged as a welfare initiative.

The examples shown above reveal that the UIDAI project will not be able to plug other than minor forms of leakages from the government aid programmes; further, that too at huge costs and many other negative fallouts.

Also, some of the technological choices made by the UIDAI project may just be not the best ones available, but in fact could be counterproductive.

A recent report based on a multi-year study by the US-based National Research Council states that biometrics are inherently unreliable for authentication as a replacement for other forms of authentication.

The reasons given are as follows:
First of all, biometric authentication is called "inherently probabilistic." That is, the match between sample and master record will always include some uncertainty - no matter how good a sample, the sensor reading the sample and the information technology system matching the sample to a master record.

Among the reasons for that uncertainty is the nature of biometric identifiers themselves. Human bodies and the features on them aren't necessarily constant over time.

 Also, biometric identifiers, while difficult to duplicate on the body of another person, are still available for surreptitious collection through fingerprint gathering, as per the report. It concludes that an imposter could be detected by a human operator administering the biometric authentication system, but that "significantly constrains remote or distributed applications of biometrics."

The report doesn't dismiss the possible usefulness of biometric authentication, however, noting that in combination with other methods, it can augment security at least in applications "where user cooperation can be inferred."

Interestingly in the case of UIDAI, none of the above cases apply. Specifically, the human operator says the ration shop owner administering the biometrics in the case of UIDAI should be considered an adversary as he would himself have interest in stealing the biometrics of the ration card holder.

Further, he operates in a remote area where what he does is not visible to the authorities unlike say in a setting such as an international airport.

Thus, he could probably design a number of ways of beating the authentication process of biometrics. It is precisely these kinds of use case scenarios that haven't been thought through thoroughly by the UIDAI folks.

Another argument given by the UIDAI authorities is that of inclusion, and that 120 million migrants have no form of identity.

Consider the following scenario: A genuine migrant with his home town from Azamgarh moves to Delhi and goes to a bank there for a loan. Since his permanent address is not Delhi, banks could deny him a loan. In fact, instead, he might be put on a terror watch list. Is there a guarantee that his UID won't be used against him, in fact to exclude him rather than for inclusion?

All the above issues point out that Aadhaar is using lack of identity as a myth to justify its spend. Remove the myth and Aadhaar stands bare, without any justification other than mainly as a national security project and for purposes of targeted marketing, linking data, tracking and surveillance, and yes, some amount of convenience due to easy check of one's identity.

What is needed today to solve the problems of the poor is not so much esoteric technology but first and foremost clear logic as to where the problems lie. Most poor get deprived of what they should get because of corruption, and not lack of identity. The bull of corruption needs to be taken by the horns and not by the tail which Aadhaar tries to do.

Secondly, the poor should be made aware of their rights, and empowered to tackle corruption. As is shown in the two videos (linked above), if at all technology should be used, it should be stealth cameras which should be given to the poor free; instead Aadhaar fetters the poor by taking their biometrics.

(The author has a B Tech from IIT Bombay, and a PhD from Columbia University, New York. He currently runs a start-up, Teknotrends Software Pvt Ltd that does cutting-edge work in the area of network security).

216 - A unique liberal dilemma - Yahoo News

Fri, Sep 24 05:49 AM
There are reports that Congress President Sonia Gandhi will lend her considerable political weight by being present at the launch of the UPA government's ambitious UID programme which seeks to give a single, unique identity number to all Indians in order to establish better state-citizen interface. In these politically charged times, with sections of the Congress sounding more coherent as opposition than the BJP, the Congress president's endorsement of the UID programme will indeed have great political significance. Of late, there is increasing opposition to the project by a small but influential section of civil society which has raised questions relating to potential violation of privacy and infringement of personal liberty by the state apparatus which might be tempted to abuse its access to the lives of citizens through the UID system.

Recently, Amartya Sen also lent some weight to such concerns by saying the UID project does raise questions of personal liberty.

Therefore, it is critical that Sonia Gandhi display unambiguous support for probably the most ambitious programmes undertaken by the UPA government so far. In fact many members of the National Advisory Council (NAC), which she heads, are highly sceptical about the UID programme. So this is one issue where Sonia Gandhi may differ with many members of NAC.

It is also interesting that among the first few UID numbers handed out will be to people living in Mumbai slums. In some ways a vast majority of the Mumbai slum-dwellers represent India's "mobile republic". As per official data, there are close to 250 million migrant workers in India who are on the move to seek jobs away from their village or place of birth. Mumbai possibly has the largest population of such subjects, most of whom are self-employed and relatively poor. So the symbolic importance of the UID launch in Mumbai slums must not be missed.

It must be clearly recognised that the emerging structure of India's economy is an unique one where 45-50 per cent of those incrementally gaining employment are self-employed. These self-employed citizens are largely poor and are considerably mobile in seeking work. The UID programme will particularly cater to some of these emerging structural realities of India's political economy. All current forms of identifications are based on specific geographical location, such as ration card, voter identification, driving licence, etc.

The UID will therefore be the only authentic, mobile identification number for over 250 million poor Indians on the move. Today banks invariably refuse to open accounts for migrant workers in big cities on the pretext that they don't have a permanent address. The UID will come as a great relief to this lot.

Some of India's liberal and enlightened citizens, who are ever so suspicious of the state's intentions, view the UID exercise as a "techno-commercial fantasy" which will not succeed. Indeed, there is a lot of cynicism around the project. However, for over 600 million poor, the physiological needs of survival clearly precede other philosophical/ intellectual concerns relating to loss of privacy felt so acutely by a section of liberal civil society.

One is not for a moment suggesting that the concerns over the UID project impinging on personal liberty are totally invalid. Simply put, there are the 600 million poor who, in the words of political scientist Partha Chatterjee, depend crucially for their survival on being able to choose tactically when to become visible and be counted by the state. This can be seen in government-led social sector programmes like rural employment guarantee, and targeted health and education services. The poor will certainly want mobile identities to be able to "become visible" at different locations across the country.

The rich, in contrast, want to largely remain out of the state's sight. In fact, it is likely that the creamy layer of society, which is economically and politically empowered, will not opt for the UID number. This lot has only limited interface with the state in their everyday life. They have access to private education, health, electricity and even security. They possibly depend on the state only for critical public goods such as clean air and water, since it is not easy to privately organise these.

Is there a contradiction between the majority of the poor seeking a sense of freedom by wanting to come under the state's radar and the others wanting to keep the state at bay while using it surreptitiously, when required? This paradox has been captured by Isaiah Berlin, one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century, in an essay where he explored "two concepts of liberty".

One concept of liberty, called negative freedom, is represented by the notion that individuals are totally free in society without any constraints or interference from others. The other concept — described as positive freedom — denotes submitting oneself to some collective form of self-determination, such as democracy. Even the 18th century French political philosopher Rousseau believed individual freedom is achieved through participation in the process whereby one's community exercises collective control over its own affairs in accordance with the "general will".

Of course, liberals argue that even in a democracy, driven by the general will, the government must actively create conditions for individuals to achieve self-realisation. This is seen in the form of constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, movement, etc in liberal constitutional democracies. In the context of the UID project, bringing a new privacy legislation will denote a measure of negative freedom gained by individuals who want to guard against an "oppressive state".

Overall, there is always a striving to achieve a balance between positive and negative freedoms in a modern democracy. The unique identity project, once implemented, will also be tested in terms of the balance our constitutional democracy achieves between positive and negative freedoms this massive exercise creates. Its legal-political complexity cannot be denied as it seeks to create an official identity to empower over a billion people. Therefore, one must debate but avoid passing a premature judgment over the question of loss of privacy and personal liberty at this stage.

Before he died some years ago, Isaiah Berlin had said the only question that still remained unresolved in his mind was, "where should individual desires end and the needs of the collective begin?" This philosophical problem is not so easily resolved.

The writer is Managing Editor, 'The Financial Express'

mk.venu@expressindia.com