Why is church supporting the UID card?

JOHN DAYAL I live in what is called a Cooperative Housing Society flat in East Delhi, among the fortunate few among the middle classes who could get to own a flat in Delhi thanks to the cooperative movement and a cooperative Delhi government in the late Seventies. Unlike DDA flats, life in such a society, even if one lives on the sixth floor, has a sense of community about it. Residents of all 57 flats in our case, former journalists and media employees from all parts of India, get quite animated about social issues, national crises and above all, on municipal issues much as members of any Residents Welfare Association would do. This week, our RWA and its members had their moment of excitement when a private sector group came to make the government Aadhar cards, or Unique Identification cards. Although I have been writing and campaigning against this UIDAI [Unique Identification Authority of India] scheme for a long time – for reasons which I will explain in a short while – my wife, like me a senior citizen, thought it would be good for us if we too got ourselves a card, in addition to the driving license, the ration card, the Income tax number, the several passports, and multiple Identity papers that we carry. As a loyal wife, she eventually did not go to get herself photographed, her iris measured, her thumb prints taken and her bio data punched in by a man who cannot spell Mary [not my wife’s name]. But she does harbour a feeling that we are going to miss this card at some future date. Patently, I am a bad campaigner where my family is concerned. I was, however, really surprised when a neighbour, a senior journalist, a former member of the Communist Party and a scholar of some reckoning met me in the lift. He was going to get his UID card made. I knew him to be a campaigner against such government floppies. “I am opposed to the UID”, he told me. ”I am getting this card made just in case the government denies us some privileges if we do not have such a card.” An ID card, meant to be a beneficial thing, had quite clearly evolved a tinge of the coercive. My neighbour is an individual and took his own decision, without the prompting of the Communist party or anyone else. But why is the church canvassing for the UIDAI? In my travels across the length and breadth of this country, I have fund Bishops and Parish priests, Pastors and their administrators pumping for the card, without really understanding or being able to explain why they think the cards are important. The only conclusion one reaches is that the Christian leadership has an innate trust in the government of the day, and honestly believes that the government cannot do any wrong. It sides with a few popular movements – such as the middle class angst of Hazare and his team, but of course not the peasantry anger which results in Maoists or the Dalit Panthers of yore. Actually, the UID card is a costly joke, possibly even dangerous in the long run. The United Kingdom has it for a brief period, and expeditiously gave it up when the populace objected to breach of privacy and security of data issues. Inaugurating Aadhar on 29, September 2009 in Tembhli Village in Maharashtra, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the project the ‘face of modern India’. To Nandan Nilekani, the billionaire co-founder of IT giant Infosys and Chairman of UIDAI with the rank of a Union minister, the project is the foundation for future development of the nation. Almost immediately, critics called it ominous. “The fact that, a project of this magnitude was implemented without even the basic formalities needed and an enabling law is a matter of utmost concern. How can a government approve a sum over Rs. 3000 crores for a dubious project, without a benefit analysis study and the approval of the parliament? The only possible reason behind the undue haste in implementing the project is the business interests involved,” a critic said. “The social, economic, political and ethical impacts of the project are of frightening scale. And well mark the beginning of the end of democracy in India.” Time therefore to bring the Church face to face with the UID reality, because the issues are important, valid and will impact on the church and the community in the long run. Experts, and the Standing Committee of Parliament on Finance, which examined this scheme have said so. Citing “contradictions and ambiguities within the government” over the implementation of the UID, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance rejected the National Identification Authority Bill and asked the government to bring a fresh legislation. The panel also suggested to the government to “reconsider and review the UID scheme”. The committee headed by senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha said the scheme “is riddled with serious lacunae.” It said the scheme had been “conceptualised with no clarity of purpose” and was “being implemented in a directionless way with a lot of confusion”. The committee pointed out that initially meant for BPL families, the scheme had been extended to all residents of India and certain other persons. The Empowered Group of Ministers set up for collating the UID and National Population Register (NPR) had “failed to take concrete decision on important issues”. These include “(a) identifying the focussed purpose of the resident identity database; (b) methodology of data collection; (c) removing the overlapping between the UID scheme and NPR; (d) conferring of statutory authority to the UIDAI since its inception; (e) structure and functioning of the UIDAI; (f) entrusting data collection and issue of unique identity number and national identification number to a single authority instead of the present UIDAI and its reconciliation with National Registration Authority”, the committee said. It noted the possibility of misuse of information in the huge data base. “It would be difficult to deal with the issues of access and misuse of personal information, surveillance, profiling, linking and matching of data bases and security confidentiality of information” in the absence of a data protection legislation. Sure enough, the scheme soon got its first data misuse. The Press trust of India reported on 3 October 2011 a complaint regarding misuse of address proof, admitted by the authorities in reply to an RTI query. However, it did not give details of the complaint, received this year, and the complainant. Writing in the Hindu on December 16, 2011 analyst R Ramkumar said the government should pay heed to the parliamentary standing committee's views and suspend the Aadhar project. It would be a travesty to push the project in through the backdoor. He explained that the parliamentary committee does not just reject the Bill; it also raises serious questions about the idea of Aadhar itself. In fact, the report so comprehensively questions the idea that any effort to introduce fresh legislation would require, as a prerequisite, a re-look at the foundational principles on which the project was conceived. Ramkumar listed five important arguments in the parliamentary report. First, it contains scathing criticism of the government for beginning Aadhar enrolment without Parliament's approval. Secondly, it questioned about the enrolment process followed for Aadhar numbers which, it said was “riddled with serious lacunae, with no clarity of purpose.” The report concludes that the enrolment process “compromises the security and confidentiality of information of Aadhar number holders,” and has “far reaching consequences for national security.” The reason: “the possibility of possession of Aadhar numbers by illegal residents through false affidavits/introducer system. “Thirdly, the government had not enacted a “national data protection law,” which is a “pre-requisite for any law that deals with large-scale collection of information from individuals and its linkages across separate databases. Fourthly, the report strongly disapproves of “the hasty manner” in which the project was cleared. isting ID documents are also not available.” And last, the report tears apart the faith placed on biometrics to prove the unique identity of individuals. The report concludes that, given the limitations of biometrics, “it is unlikely that the proposed objectives of the UID scheme could be achieved.” Law researcher and civil society activist Dr. Usha Ramanathan, the nation’s top expert on the subject, says the UID project is an experiment – not a solution. She said while recognizing that biometrics is "sensitive information", the agency has washed its hands of responsibility for the safety, security and confidentiality of the data during enrolment and passed the buck to the registrars. In Mumbai women were unable to enroll because of blisters and calluses and the effect of abrasive detergents on their hands. In Bangalore and Delhi that senior citizens were unable to get enrolled because their fingerprints did not work. The credibility roadblocks that these reports were setting up were sought to be removed by the UIDAI by threatening enrollers with "action" if they turned any person away. Questions have arisen about persons with disabilities, some of whom may not have fingerprints or irises that meet the biometric standards required by the UIDAI for enrolment. In Pune, a man received his UID with his wife's photograph appended to it. The US magazine The New Yorker describes how this embarrassment is sought to be averted: a computer operator sits in an office running through enrolment forms to make a cursory judgment whether the image matches the demographic information. "That day," the journalist reports, "he had already inspected more than 5,000 photographs, and he had clicked "incorrect" 300 times: men listed as women, children as adults, photographs with two heads in them." It seems there are infinite variations to the theme of error. In May, "unidentified persons" walked away with two laptops and a pen drive which held data pertaining to 140 persons from an enrolment centre in a school in Hadaspur, Maharashtra. The back-up information was also on the same laptop. The data included "sensitive details" relating to passports, voter ID cards, bank accounts, photographs and a range of other information. In July, five persons were arrested in Bangalore for issuing fake UID. The UIDAI heard about the racket when they were approached with complaints that "Global ID Solutions" was selling franchises to customers to take up Aadhar enrolment for a non-refundable fee of Rs. 2.5 lakh an enrolment kit. This episode exposed the perils of indiscriminate outsourcing. In October, a software error resulted in hundreds of residents of Colaba in south Mumbai having their addresses recorded as Kolaba, Raigarh district. The enrollers claimed that this was a software glitch and that enrolees would just have to return another day to re-enrol. Only, the guidelines of the UIDAI do not have a provision for re-enrolling any resident. Dr. Ramanathan says “This is no innocent data collection in a vacuum. Set amidst NATGRID and UID, it conjures Orwellian images of Big Brother. The relationship between the state and the people is set to change dramatically, and irretrievably, and it appears to be happening without even a discussion about what it means. The National Population Register has been launched countrywide, after an initial foray in the coastal belt. All persons in India aged over 15 years are to be loaded on to a database. This will hold not just their names and the names of their parents, sex, date of birth, place of birth, present and permanent address, marital status – and “if ever married, name of spouse” – but also their biometric identification, which would include a photograph and all eight fingers and two thumbs imprinted on it. This is being spoken of with awe, as the ‘biggest-ever' census exercise in history. 1.2 billion people are to be brought on to this database before the exercise is done. This could well be a marvel without parallel. But what will this exercise really do? Dr. Ramanathan cautions it is wise not to forget that this is not data collection in a vacuum. It is set amidst NATGRID (National Intelligence Grid), the UID and a still-hazy-but-waiting-in-the-wings DNA Bank. Each of these has been given spurs by the Union Home Ministry, with security as the logic for surveillance and tracking by the state and its agencies. The benign promise of targeted welfare services is held out to legitimise this exercise. She says if the Home Ministry were to have its way, NATGRID will enable 11 security and intelligence agencies, including RAW, the IB, the Enforcement Directorate, the National Investigation Agency, the CBI, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and the Narcotics Control Bureau and other secret services, to access consolidated data from 21 categories of databases. These would include railway and air travel, income tax, phone calls, bank account details, credit card transactions, visa and immigration records, property records, and the driving licences of citizens. It is the admitted position that the information gathered in the house-to-house survey, and the biometrics collected during the exercise, will feed into the UID database. The UID document says the information that data base will hold will only serve to identify if the person is who the person says he, or she, is. It will not hold any personal details about anybody. What the document does not say is that it will provide the bridge between the ‘silos' of data that are already in existence, and which the NPR will also bring into being. So with the UID as the key the profile of any person resident in India can be built up. Why is a problem? Dr. Ramanathan answers “Because privacy will be breached. Because it gives room for abuse of the power that the holder of this information acquires. Because the information never goes away, even when life moves on. So if a person is dyslexic some time in life, is a troubled adolescent, has taken psychiatric help at some stage in life, was married but is now divorced and wants to leave that behind in the past, was insolvent till luck and hard work produced different results, donated to a cause that is to be kept private — all of this is an open book, forever, to the agency that has access to the data base. And, there are some like me who would consider it demeaning to have this relationship with the state. For the poor, who often live on the margins of life and legality, it could provide the badge of potential criminality in a polity where ostensible poverty has been considered a sign of dangerousness. (This is not hyperbole; read the beggary laws, and the attitude of some courts reflected in the comment that `giving land for resettlement to an encroacher is like rewarding a pickpocket.')” “Also, the Citizenship Rules cast every ‘individual' and every ‘head of family' in the role of an ‘informant' who may be subjected to penalties if he does not ensure that every person gets on to the NPR, and keeps information about themselves and their ‘dependents' updated. There isn't even an attempt at speaking in the language of democracy!” Dr. Ramanathan points out. Concerned with these issues, eminent persons led by former Kerala Law minister and retired Supreme Court justice VR Krishna Iyer demanded in a joint statement, that the UID project be halted, a feasibility study be done covering all aspects of this issue, experts be tasked with studying its constitutionality, the law on privacy be urgently worked on, a cost- benefit analysis be done and a public, informed debate be conducted before any such major change be brought in. We should await such an exercise before so enthusiastically encouraging innocent parishioners to get their fingerprints and eyes scanned.