Is there anything that ties the humble tomato with a smartphone, bulldozer, manhole cover and an Aadhaar card? When objects speak, what do they reveal about our living conditions? With Talking Things, The Wire takes a deeper look at how these mundane objects have evolved against the backdrop of the Modi-led Union government’s decade-long tenure.
New Delhi: “Anyone and everyone who is a resident of India can get an Aadhaar number, and it lets a person prove just one fact: “I am me.”” (Nandan Nilekani, October 2018)
“‘Enrollment would be voluntary, and available to all residents. And there would be no I.D. cards – just I.D. numbers. A card, carrying a photograph and other biometric information, can confirm identity offline; it’s a database of one. But cards can suggest authoritarianism, and they create a market, for they can be bought and sold.” (Nandan Nilekani, September 2011)
“The poor will benefit the most from Aadhaar as the Government will be able to correctly identify beneficiaries of various social sector schemes based on the Aadhaar number.” (P. Chidambaram, October 2012)
“Congress workers across the country have been dancing to the tune of ‘Aadhaar’, claiming that it is some magic ‘jadi-buti’ (natural cure) for any problem that people may have. …now the Supreme Court has scolded them on this very Aadhaar. The prime minister [Manmohan Singh] must tell the country, how many rupees have been spent on this Aadhaar card? Where has that money gone? Who is benefiting from the Aadhaar card? …I had warned them [the Singh government], if you keep giving Aadhaar cards to people, it will be easier for the people who want to infiltrate India. People from neighbouring countries will enter India, and take away our rights using illegal means.” (Narendra Modi, September 26, 2013)
“On Aadhaar, neither the Team that I met nor PM could answer my Qs on security threat it can pose. There is no vision, only political gimmick.” (Narendra Modi, April 2014)
“[Aadhaar] is an instrument for good governance. Aadhaar is a mode to reach the poor and needy without the middlemen.” (Ravi Shankar Prasad, 2015)
“The Aadhaar number or the authentication thereof shall not, by itself, confer any right of, or be proof of, citizenship or domicile in respect of an Aadhaar number holder.” (Aadhar Act, 2016)
“…biometric data collection by private agencies is not a great idea.” (Supreme Court, January 2017)
“Our problem was not with the idea of Aadhaar, but with the inadequacies of Aadhaar. We have never opposed anything for the sake of opposition. I do not believe in that kind of politics. The UPA government had a problem of imagination and an even bigger problem of implementation. I knew Aadhaar had potential. For years they ran Aadhaar, but it still didn’t have any parliamentary backing, nor integration with public service delivery.” (Narendra Modi, July 2017)
“These days you keep hearing about Aadhaar. I want to say Aadhaar has added great strength to India’s development. What would earlier get into the wrong hands is now going to the intended beneficiaries.” (Narendra Modi, January 2018)
“In many respects, it is a “dumb” ID, capturing less information about users rather than more. It knows only four data points about each holder: name, date of birth, address, and gender.” (Nandan Nilekani, October 2018)
“There was no system in place to check the affirmations of the applicant. As such, there is no assurance that all the Aadhaar holders in the country are ‘Residents’ as defined in the Aadhaar Act.” (Comptroller and Auditor General, April 2022)
“[Aadhaar is] a proof of identity, not of citizenship or date of birth.” (Aadhaar cards, January 2024 onwards)
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Fifteen years ago, the United Progressive Alliance government headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – and guided by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani – created the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Their goal, they said, was to provide a “foundation” or “Aadhaar” to each resident of India: a 12-digit unique number linked to your biometric data; a number that sets you apart from everyone else; a number, in Nilekani’s words, to prove that you are you.
But that’s never been all that it is; nor was it really envisioned to be just that. It was sold as path to a more efficient India: weeding out “fake” beneficiaries of government welfare schemes; digitising the relationship between the government and the people it’s meant to serve; doing away with potential corruption in welfare delivery; creating an easy link between the various parts of a person’s life (their phones, bank accounts, income tax payments, etc.).
The exercise faced criticism from the very start. Privacy experts and rights activists raised various red flags and questions: How would the data be collected and stored in ways that protected privacy? What would happen in areas where there was no digital literacy or infrastructure? Who was benefiting from this giant, expensive exercise?
While Nilekani in 2011 had insisted that Aadhaar will not be a “card” – the card, Prashant Reddy T. wrote in 2017, “serves no purpose other than telling a person their Aadhaar number”– government functionaries have, since then, often referred to the card as the thing around which the programme functions.
Modi changes his mind
Among those raising these questions was none other than Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat. While campaigning before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections – which would prove to be his entryway into the prime minister’s office – Modi claimed that he had written to Singh time and again with his concerns, and received no response.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
During his election campaign, the then prime ministerial hopeful was critical not just of the UPA government but also of Nilekani. At a rally in Bangalore (the city that headquarters Nilekani’s company, Infosys) on April 8, 2014, Modi claimed that lakhs and crores of taxpayers’ money had been sunk into this project. He took a dig at Nilekani, saying, “those who think they’ve given birth to IT in this country did not listen to a common man like me”.
About six weeks after that speech, on May 26, 2014, Modi was sworn in as the prime minister. Just a month later, on July 1, 2014, he met Nilekani (at the latter’s request). This meeting was reportedly so successful that Modi decided immediately to revive the programme.
Nilekani, Shankkar Aiyar writes in Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India’s 12-Digit Revolution, was able to allay the prime minister’s fears on data security and also point to how Aadhaar could “resolve many issues” like the targeting of subsidies and curbing corruption. Soon after, the Modi regime declared that it would be passing a law that would give legal sanctity to the UIDAI. This was at a time when the Supreme Court was already hearing petitions on various different questions arising out of the programme, including its use in welfare distribution. (On September 23, 2013, the court had noted that “no person should suffer for not getting the Aadhaar card in spite of the fact that some authority had issued a circular making it mandatory”.)
From there on, there was no looking back. In March 2016, the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act was enacted. It was controversially pushed through by the government as a money Bill – the kind that does not need to be approved by the Rajya Sabha, where the BJP did not have a majority. Section 7 of the Act seemed to make possessing an Aadhaar card inevitable – and suggested it would eventually be mandatory:
“The Central Government or, as the case may be, the State Government may, for the purpose of establishing identity of an individual as a condition for receipt of a subsidy, benefit or service for which the expenditure is incurred from, or the receipt therefrom forms part of, the Consolidated Fund of India, require that such individual undergo authentication, or furnish proof of possession of Aadhaar number or in the case of an individual to whom no Aadhaar number has been assigned, such individual makes an application for enrolment.”
In September 2018, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of the Aadhaar Act and the programme, but struck down certain provisions of the Act, including clauses that allowed sharing of data for national security purposes and the usage of the biometric authentication system by private corporations. The court also said mandatory Aadhaar-bank linking was “unconstitutional”, but upheld the need for an Aadhaar number while filing income tax returns. In 2019, the Union government amended the Aadhaar Act in ways that experts argue went against the Supreme Court order – including by allowing private players (banks and telecom operators) to carry out Aadhaar authentication.
Over the last 10 years, the number of things we must possess an Aadhaar number to access in India has only gone up, including (but not limited to): midday meals; filing income tax returns; University Grants Commission fellowships; compensation schemes; MGNREGA work; a number of government schemes; death registration; and even deep sea fishing. Despite carefully maintaining that it is a “voluntary” programme, the regime has slowly but surely ensured that Aadhaar is mandatory in all the ways that matter.
But at what cost? There are two serious criticisms of the programme – that it leads to exclusions in social welfare and that it encroaches on people’s right to privacy – that remain unanswered, even as Aadhaar has pushed so far into our daily lives now that we almost cannot see it.
The exclusion
In September 2018, 11-year-old Santoshi Kumari died in Jharkhand’s Simdega district, after reportedly not having eaten for eight days. Her family’s ration card, using which they should have been eligible for rations under the National Food Security Act, had been cancelled for not being linked to Aadhaar, and the local ration dealer refused to sell the family foodgrain. Because of the Durga Puja holidays, Santoshi also couldn’t access the midday meal at school.
Her death created a storm; while activists and journalists had detailed several instances of welfare exclusion created by Aadhaar before, the death of an 11-year-old girl caught attention in ways that the administration could not ignore. Caught on the backfoot, they claimed that Santoshi had died of malaria and not hunger – but evidence from the ground did not support this. The next year, right to food activists and academics compiled a list of 42 hunger-related deaths across the country in 2017 and 2018, and said that 25 of them could be linked to issues of welfare exclusion created by Aadhaar.
In other schemes too, particularly the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), researchers have detailed how the mandatory Aadhaar link has led to exclusions rather than the claimed (but not proved) efficiency. According to LibTech India, 7.6 crore workers had their MGNREGA job cards deleted in the 21 months after the Union government decided Aadhaar-based payments must be mandatory, because for various reasons – like a slight difference in the spelling of their name between their Aadhaar cards and job cards – they were ineligible for Aadhaar-based payments.
In the Supreme Court judgment upholding the validity of the Aadhaar Act in September 2018 (delivered just days before Santoshi’s death), Justice A.K. Sikri while delivering the majority verdict said that though people being denied entitlements and rations because of Aadhaar-based technology was “concerning”, throwing out the whole Act on this basis would be “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”.
An Aadhaar enrolment camp, Nawada, Bihar. Photo: UIDAI website
It would be wrong to dismiss the exclusions created by linking Aadhaar with welfare programmes as teething trouble. This is something the Modi government too seems to recognise – as was made clear when it was forced to agree, earlier this year, that “case by case” exemptions may be required for ‘mandatory’ Aadhaar-based payment under the MGNREGA.
The mandatory payment system came into force from January 1 this year after multiple extensions, during which states were supposed to get their databases ready. The very same day, the Union rural development ministry issued a statement that said, “In case, if any gram panchayat of a district in the state is having either technical [problems] or Aadhaar-related [problems], the Government of India may consider exemption from APBS on [a] case to case basis till the resolution of the issue.”
Privacy concerns
In open court during the Aadhaar hearings, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud – currently the chief justice of India – had said that the project is “completely violative of privacy”. “Constitutional guarantees cannot be subjected to probability algorithms and technological vicissitudes,” he said. Justice Chandrachud had partially dissented from the majority opinion.
What Justice Chandrachud said then is in line with what privacy rights activists have argued ever since this programme became a reality. While arguing in court about the so-called safety of this data, the Union government made a claim that has since become an oft-repeated joke: that Aadhaar data is protected by walls that are “13 feet tall and 5 feet thick”. Leak after leak has proven that these walls, however thick they might be, simply don’t cut it. The UIDAI has been unable to provide answers to those whose data has been revealed to the world without their consent. In fact, as economist Jean Drèze wrote, “far from ensuring that your identity information is secure, the UIDAI is selling it (or is, at least, authorised to sell it) to anyone who has your number and cares to pay the fees. Only the core biometrics are protected.”
In addition to the concerns around leaks – and related issues like identity theft – is the concern around surveillance. In 2018, American whistleblower Edward Snowden called Aadhaar a “mass surveillance system”. Global digital rights organisation Access Now has classified Aadhaar as one of the “Big ID” systems around the world, and said that its “law and design enabled surveillance” – particularly through its “seeding” mechanism, linking Aadhaar numbers to numerous other databases. This was particularly concerning for experts, given the lack of clear-cut protective mechanisms for citizens when it comes to state surveillance. Accepting these concerns, the Supreme Court had said that Aadhaar metadata must be deleted every six months
Fifteen years after the Aadhaar programme was imagined, the ease with which our personal data is demanded of us – most recently at airports, under another programme that claims to be mandatory but is slipped in as required – has only gone up. Private entities are being allowed to store this data, with little oversight or regulation on what happens to it. “I am me” – a simple and catchy phrase that apparently defined Aadhaar – comes with a voice that offers individual agency; it is I who wishes to identify myself. But the programme and world it has created, over the years, have crept so far into our lives that they no longer needs our permission to exist and announce themselves.
Read more from Talking Things, here.