#MarginalizedAadhaar: Is India’s Aadhaar enabling more exclusion in social welfare for marginalized communities? · Global Voices
<PERSON>, a Lanjia Sora language speaker walking in her home in Rayagada district, Odisha, India. (Image by author, CC-BY-SA 4.0 License)
This post was first published at Yoti as a part of <PERSON> Digital Identity Fellowship. It has been edited for Global Voices.
The recent State of Aadhaar report that claims statistically that the Indian digital identity has mostly been beneficial with a negligible exclusion is in sync with the makers of the technology and largely the Indian government. However, perspectives reflected through interviews with marginalized communities and other stakeholder experts prove otherwise.
The report claims that 92 percent of the 167,000 surveyed people are “satisfied with Aadhaar’’ and 90 percent “trust that their data are safe in the Aadhaar system.’’
The report, however, did not address surveillance and risks to the right to privacy, which is crucial to the human rights and digital rights of India's population of 1.3 billion people (1.23 billion out of the total 1.3 billion people have enrolled for Aadhaar by 1 January 2020). The report was published by international consulting firm Dalberg Global Development Advisors with support from Omidyar Network.
The Indian government also often puts the state's national security above such individual rights, a concern that has recently been amplified with the ongoing discussions around the Personal Data Protection Bill of 2019 (read the proposed bill here) which can give the government agencies to access people's private data.
What is Aadhaar?
Aadhaar is a unique 12 digit number provided by a public organization Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) that Indian residents can obtain by providing their biometric data and demographic data. Aadhaar is tied to a range of citizen beneficiary services, and logistical and technical issues have led to the exclusion of many marginalized communities. Similarly, the use of personal data in Aadhaar for authentication by public and private entities have raised serious human rights issues.
Unique Identity (UID) is used to tag Indian citizens with Aadhaar by centralizing a range of personal data (including biometric). 607
Contrary to a popular misconception that Aadhaar is yet another “card” that provides the Indian citizens a form of identity, it is merely a number.
Research subjects
The 20 individuals — whose interviews form the basis for this report — are from communities that are marginalized on the basis of social and economic factors and are based in the Indian states of Odisha and Uttarakhand in four different locations. Five (25%) of the interviewees were women and two of those women were illiterate, whereas the male interviewees were all literate. Interviewees from Odisha were from two adivasi (indigenous) communities — Lanjia Sora and Jurai Sora, and the interviews from Uttarakhand were from low economic groups.
The other set of interviewees were key stakeholders including human rights lawyers and activists, litigators, ethnographers, and academic and other researchers.
Aadhaar, social benefits, and exclusion
As Aadhaar has been and is being linked to many citizen beneficiary services, authorities tend to use fingerprint scanning-based identification and authentication. Services like state pension or rations (food, fuels and so on) — or even subsidized healthcare — are received by individuals who are generally marginalized on the basis of age, literacy, access to public information in one’s own language, etc. Illness or manual labor can cause loss of or change in fingerprints which one might have to update periodically. Such a case can make a fingerprint-based authentication to fail.
‘‘For someone already part of a public system and already receiving their benefits, the complexity of getting everything connected through Aadhaar becomes burdensome,’’ shares a researcher-interviewee (who did not want to be named) who was studying the receipt of public benefits such as pensions and Public Distribution System (PDS), a federal government initiative to provide food and essential commodities to people in need with the objective of eradicating poverty) in rural Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. He adds, “people who do manual labor, or have an illness, or are in old age (or any of these combinations) often find their fingerprints are not detected or authenticated’’ while emphasizing how authentication using a mobile number or biometric (it has to be either in the case of Aadhaar) has many flaws, an issue researcher and human rights lawyer Dr. <PERSON> and advocate <PERSON> also highlighted.
According to Dr. 607