UPA’s Unique Identification Project (UID): A Corporate-sponsored Attack on Democracy and Civil Liberties

“The national identity card scheme represents the worst of government. It is intrusive and bullying. It is ineffective and expensive. It is an assault on individual liberty that does not promise a great good…” Theresa May (British Home Secretary) announcing the complete dismantling of the UID project in the UK in June 2010.

The UPA’s National Identification Authority of India Bill has been approved by the Union Cabinet, and subsequently the UPA has already launched its much-touted and ambitious Unique Identification project (UID) in some parts of the country. It is to be noted that this massive project, which has tremendous repercussions for democracy in India, is being introduced without even a formal clearance by the Indian parliament, let alone a broad-based, country-wide discussion on its implications. It is also ironical that the UPA is promoting the UID project in India at a time when several countries across the world (including the USA, the UK, Australia, China, Canada and Germany) have scrapped similar projects. As the powers-that-be try to convince us of the ‘advantages’ of the UID project, let us have a look at certain facts about this project:

False Claims of ‘Better Delivery of Social Sector Schemes’:

This project is being promoted under patently false premises – according to the UPA, the UID will enable ‘inclusive growth’ by providing each citizen with a verifiable identity. If we were to believe the likes of Manmohan Singh and Nandan Nilekini (who is in charge of implementing the project), the UID will ‘facilitate delivery of basic services’, and ‘plug leakages’ in public expenditure. However, the fact remains that exclusion from social sector schemes are NOT caused by the inability to prove identity – they are caused by the deliberate manipulation of the system by those who have the power to control the flow of benefits. When BPL families are unable to make use of their valid ration cards, when students from deprived backgrounds are unable to avail of scholarships meant for them, when workers are not paid the legally mandated minimum wages, or when women workers in NREGA schemes are paid less than their due, the reason is NEVER their lack of ability to prove their identity. And therefore, none of these problems will be solved by the possession of a UID number; the UID scheme cannot guarantee benefits.

Violation of Privacy and Civil Liberties:

The UID scheme will mean a large-scale violation of our right to privacy, which has been guaranteed to us both by the Indian constitution as well as by a host of international and domestic laws. The proposed draft bill empowers the National Identification Authority of India (NIDAI) to disclose personal data on an order of a court or in case of “national security”, and therefore opens the doors to gross misuse by persons in power. Now, information collected through the national census process will be made available to several agencies (both public and private), which is in contravention to the provisions of the Census Act. As a result, 11 security and intelligence agencies, including RAW, the IB, the National Investigation Agency, the CBI and the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence will have access to the data. This raises the specter of gross violations of human rights. Also, many of these agencies are completely out of the ambit of democratic control – they are not open to public scrutiny (since they don’t even have to adhere to the Right to Information Act) and cannot by held accountable for what they do with the information.

What is really at stake is not just the privacy of individuals: the UID has all the ingredients for dangerous and fascist social control of the state over its citizens. Sensitive personal information will be provide to state as well as private agencies, which can be used as a weapon of war, and to victimize ethnic groups, minorities and political adversaries. The UID project in fact leaves us with a distinct sense of déjà vu: let us not forget that during the Second World War, the Nazis used extensive databases created by the International Business Machines (IBM) for targeted profiling of the Jews and subsequently for confiscating their assets, pushing them into ghettos and finally killing them.

The fact of the matter is that the UID shows that the state wants to treat each of its citizens as potential ‘criminals’, ‘terrorists’ and ‘security threats’! This is the very basis of tracking and profiling of individuals. For a long time, the state has shamefully routinely treated poverty as a ‘crime’ to be ‘punished’ (the laws governing beggary are proof enough of this). Time and again, the state machinery has been accused of being communal; various governments have been indicted of involvement in torture, fake encounters and forced disappearances. Given this situation, the UID will be potential weapon of war in the hands of any government – and that is something no democracy can accept.

The Smokescreen of ‘Voluntary Participation’:

The UPA is trying to hide the draconian aspects of the UID project by claiming that providing information will be ‘voluntary’. However, it has already become clear that this claim is completely bogus, since several agencies (like banks and the LIC) can and in fact will insist on their customers having UID numbers! The upcoming legislation on the UID does not even bother to speak the language of democracy – according to the provisions of the proposed bill, one can be penalized for not updating the information provided to the UID project.

Possible Exclusion of the Poor From Schemes:

Shockingly, instead of facilitating inclusion, around 150 million people are likely to be excluded from benefits because of the UID scheme. This is because of the inappropriate and unproven technology which will be used, which will lead to so-called ‘low-quality’ fingerprints taken from millions of Indians working in agriculture, construction workers and other manual labourers who have worn-out fingers due to a lifetime of hard labour. Ironically, the UID scheme is being introduced in the name of precisely these people (who are most likely to be excluded).

Unjustifiable Costs:

The current costs are estimated at whopping Rs.45,000 crores. And this is probably a gross underestimate. Operationalising the UID scheme on the ground for NREGA and the public distribution system would require placing fingerprint readers at every panchayat office and every ration shop. The total costs of placing fingerprint readers in each PDS outlet and in each of India’s 600,000 villages have not been taken into account in official cost calculations.

Bypassing of Democratic Decision-making Processes:

The UID Authority has been set up with considerable powers and resources, without any approval from Parliament or discussion in the public domain about the necessity of such a scheme. India already has 15 different identification schemes: why then do we need yet another scheme? When there are so many grave issues involved, why is the government promoting the UID scheme in such a secretive manner, without sufficient debate? And, if the poor as merely the excuse being used to promote this scheme (as progressive and democratic voices have pointed out), then who is the real driver behind it?

In order to implement the UID scheme, the UIDAI (UID Authority of India) has already signed several MOUs with various national and multinational companies (including several banks and the LIC), state governments and other ministries. Notable amongst these is L-1 Identities Solution, a company which works with various US intelligence agencies and whose main client is the US government’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to the company, American and foreign military services, defense and intelligence agencies rely on it to help determine ‘ally from enemy’. Another company involved in the UID project is Accenture, which is working with US Homeland Security in their Smart Borders Project. The company states that its “solutions include developing prevention tactics, streamlining intelligence gathering and maximizing new technologies.” And these companies are implementing India’s UID project!

Also, actively promoting the UID project is the World Bank, which has a long history of promoting similar initiatives and is currently funding 14 projects related to e-government and e-ID around the world. It is therefore clear from all the available information that all the data collected under the UID scheme will be leaked to the global public domain sooner or later.

The proposed NIAI Bill must be looked at along with other Bills in the offing such as Draft Land Titling Bill, 2010, Draft Paper on Privacy Bill, 2010, Draft DNA Profiling Act, 2007 and Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations (PIII) for a National Knowledge Network. Besides this, National Intelligence Grid (Natgrid), meant to integrate existing 21 databases with Central and state government agencies and other organisations, and National Population Register (which is quite different from Census) will end up undertaking surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting of Indian residents.

The UID scheme is a blatant attempt to convert a resident into a number, the Indian population into a global market and then citizens in to subjects. The revolving door phenomena – where corporate honchos dictate, guide and execute public policy – is very much visible in the UID project too. Which explains their unadulterated enthusiasm for this project. Clearly, the UID project will open the doors to an unprecedented access of our personal and financial information to the corporate world; paving the way for misuse and manipulation of such information.

admin

9 thoughts on “UPA’s Unique Identification Project (UID): A Corporate-sponsored Attack on Democracy and Civil Liberties

  1. Your concerns are misplaced. It is your misunderstanding that proving identity will not lead to better delivery of social schemes. Actually biometric authentication will weed out duplicate and fake persons. It is not providing identity which leads to better delivery but authentication associated with identity.
    The scheme is optional and as the name suggests is Aadhaar to the needy. Hence i don’t think rich will enroll and hence this is a poverty alleviation scheme. It is only essential to get PDS,NREGA and other benefits. If you don’t want the benefits then don’t enroll.
    The percentage of people who have worn out fingerprints is very small(Aprox 2-3%) and there are mechanisms to authenticate them through passwords and photographs.
    Costs of the project are around 20,000 crores and benefits around
    1,40,000 crores(Mc kinsey report).I leave it to you to decide which is better.
    This AISA writeup is only meant to oppose the government and smacks of rabid student unionism and is far-fetched reality.

  2. Mukesh Kamath,

    This is in response to your comments. To begin with, the views expressed in this writeup are not AISA’s alone (as you must be well aware, since you seem to be so informed about the UID project!). Several progressive and democratic voices across the country have echoed these sentiments. Would you please explain, why if such schemes were indeed so good, several countries are doing away with it? Would you explain why, despite providing adequate authentification and identification, people are not able to avail of social sector schemes? Why LIC and several banks etc are demanding UID numbers, if indeed the UID is ‘voluntary’ as you claim? Why groups which primarily serve the US military establishment are involved in India’s UID programme? These are important questions that cannot be escaped from!

  3. Dear Author,
    Most nations in the world at some point in their existence have felt a need to use a number to identify their citizens. United kingdom which you might be referring to has a national insurance number(NIN) to fall back to even if they are not going ahead with any boimetric card system.
    In Hungary The Constitutional Court has decided in 1991: “A general, uniform personal identification code which may be used without restriction (i.e. a personal number) distributed to every citizen and to every resident of the country based on an identical principle is unconstitutional.” Although the universal use of national identification number is considered to be unconstitutional, it is still used in many places.
    In Australia even though the government did not move forward with access card(Bio metric based) they still have a medicare card number,Tax File Number and state driver’s license which are used to identify people.

    Our country does not have any fall back or alternative which can be used nationwide.

  4. Our country has 15 different identification schemes, and we certainly do not need yet another number to tag us! That too a scheme that has such serious problems! And what about the other questions we are raising?

  5. Dear Mr. Kamath,
    You highlighted the Mc Kinsey report, while talking about the expected costs and benefits of the UID. I just have a few words to say on this. Justification of such projects through ‘creation’ of favorable knowledge is not new, as one of the greatest champions of such ‘development’, and ‘modernization’, the World Bank has set up a trend in this regard. I have come across a number of such bogus studies, based on hypothetical econometric models, and surveys based on actual sample size as small as 400 people, to justify claims and policy prescriptions impacting the lives of millions. The greatest champion of knowledge creation in this regard is the World Bank, and it has hired consultancies like Price Waterhouse Cooper to justify water privatization. However, most of such companies reap huge amount of money as consultancy fee, and associated research fee, but what practical benefit comes out of such studies and reports is seldom questioned. For example, one of the most blunderer companies in Indian History, Enron, was once one of the the biggest clients of Mc Kinsey, and the wise and futuristic consultancy of Mc Kinsey led it to collapse, much to the pains of Indian taxpayers. Similar was the fate of SwissAir and Railtrack, who did nose dive after getting the wise advice of the great consultency firm. My humble question is, how can we put the fate of crores of Indians on bait, given such great history of these studies, and their proponents?

  6. UID poses one of gravest threat imaginable as far as citizen’s right is concerned. It will damage citizens’ sovereignty beyond repair and as the fascist forces in this country are getting stronger it has the potential to cause holocaust like situation in future through profiling of minorities, political opponents and ethnic group lik gujrat progrom or sikh massacre etc ,It is the same path which IBM traversed with the Nazi Germany for targeted asset confiscation, ghettoisation, deportation, and ultimately extermination with its punch card and card sorting system(precursor to the computer) that made the automation of human destruction possible

  7. Undeniably believe that which you stated. Your favorite reason appeared to be on the net the
    easiest thing to be aware of. I say to you, I definitely get irked while people think about worries that they just do not know about. You managed to hit the nail upon the top and defined out the whole thing without having side effect , people can take a signal. Will likely be back to get more. Thanks

Leave a Reply