The Aadhaar judgment divides the people of this country into those receiving state assistance, and others. The former will get socio-economic rights if they do as they are asked to do. Privacy is a luxury they can ill afford.
The signs were there from the beginning. The poor were part of the marketing strategy for promoting a project that would require people to enrol in a database that would be used as an “identity platform” on which businesses could be built. In 2013 itself, Nandan Nilekani was clear about these business ambitions. And, in February 2018, when Nilekani wrote that the project was not about savings at all but, he said, “as someone who had a part to play in the creation of Aadhaar, I can assert we always thought of it as a universal digital infrastructure, not just a scheme,” it became plainer still that the poor, and the explanation of leakage and savings, were merely the justification.
The 2010 Strategy Overview said: “The UID will only guarantee identity, not rights, benefits or entitlements.”
In 2010, a UIDAI document admitted that nothing was known about whether, and to what extent, biometrics would work. “While NIST (in the US) documents the fact that the accuracy of biometric matching is extremely dependent on demographics and environmental conditions, there is a lack of a sound study that documents the accuracy achievable on Indian demographics (a larger percentage of rural population) and in Indian environmental conditions (extremely hot and humid climates and facilities without air-conditioning). In fact, we could not find any credible study assessing the achievable accuracy in any of the developing countries.”
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