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Digital dividend or digital divide?

ON 14 February 2010, The Hindu reported the then Chairperson of the UIDAI as saying that the ‘model’ had changed, from ‘roti, kapada, makaan’ in the 1960s and 1970s to the slogan in the last several years of ‘bijli, sadak, pani.’ This later slogan, he said, was now ‘passe’. ‘Today, it’s all virtual things – its about UID number,¹ mobile phone (number), and bank account (number).’ His vision, that ‘if we can get everyone to have a UID number, if we can get everyone to have a bank account and if we can get everyone to have a mobile phone, then we are giving them tools of opportunity. With that, they can access services, benefits and their rights.’ These, according to him, are the ‘real foundation.’²

This imagination, which misses altogether a further triumvirate of concerns – jal, jangal, jameen, around which much of the land conflicts in the country revolve – is proving to be not about digital dividend, but about the digital divide. There are a score of explanations for the digital divide including information deficit, literacy, connectivity, affordability, access to the technology, institutional absences, technologies that may work among some people but not among others – and biometrics is one prominent example.

Does evidence matter while pursuing the technological dream? Toyama, a self-professed geek, has written down the lessons he learnt while in India working for Microsoft, trying to gain answers to the question: ‘How could electronic technologies contribute to social causes in the world’s poorest communities?’³ His findings: Brilliant technology is not enough to save us from ourselves.⁴ That technology amplifies people’s capacities in the direction of their intentions. Technology is powerful, but in India it became clear to him that throwing gadgets at social problems isn’t effective.⁵ In the worst cases, technology was detrimental.⁶ Contrary to popular belief, digitization by itself doesn’t necessarily reduce costs.⁷

The lessons were drawn from the field where, too, he learnt to question assumptions about technologies. ‘That technological giants are messianic about their creations is no surprise,’ he writes. ‘World leaders are convinced that technology will make the world a better place. But does technology really cause positive social change?’ And wonders: ‘So during a golden age of innovation in the world’s most technologically advanced country, [he is here talking about the US] there has been no dent in our rate of poverty.⁸ All of our amazing digital technologies, widely disseminated, didn’t alleviate our most glaring ill.’⁹ The rest of his book is the story of why experiments and experiences on the ground turned him into a technology heretic, in which part he saw uses for technology, but did not see technology as the solution to social problems.

In another arena, there is growing and compelling evidence in the UID project which demonstrates that technological utopia is insupportable. The most striking and obvious failures have been in biometrics. The claim of the project proponents that UID would be a number attached to biometrics; and that fingerprints and the iris would be the way uniqueness would be ensured was untested when it was launched and, year after year, has proven to be deeply flawed.

A 2011 report in Firstpost reads:¹⁰ ‘The findings on the ground were revelatory. Operators and technical experiments at the UID enrolment centres confirmed to Firstpost that they routinely came across cases where fingerprints had been damaged/destroyed/ underdeveloped. And such cases, they said, were more common among senior citizens, those involved in manual labour (who handle rough objects, for instance) and children (mostly below ten years of age).’

In 2012, when biometric authentication was first attempted in Jharkhand, the trial ran into problems. Fingerprint authentication just did not work. ‘A few days before 2 October when the Chief Secretary of Jharkhand was to hand over pensions through AECTs (aadhaar enabled cash transfer) at a function at Tigra panchayat, block officials and business correspondents tried frantically to make the fingerprints verification go through for forty-five beneficiaries. It worked only in the case of nine. Since 2 October, even these nine have not been paid through AECTs even once...’¹¹

In 2013, it was reported from Mysore:¹² ‘The biometric authentication system installed at the PDS outlets fails to establish the identity of many genuine beneficiaries mostly workers as their daily grind in the agricultural fields, construction sites or as domestic help have eroded the lines on their thumbs resulting in distorted impressions.’

And so it has gone on till 2016:¹³ ‘Rajasthan presses on with aadhaar after fingerprint readers failed: We’ll buy iris scanners – the state is pushing the use of unique identification project despite lack of infrastructure and administrative preparedness, experimenting on the poorest.’ Very different from the promise that technology utopians find in ‘disruption’; disruption is experienced on the ground as a denial of services and entitlements. It is not only authentication that has shown up the severity of exclusion through biometrics. In its response to the Supreme Court in the cases pending before it, the UIDAI admits that 80 million enrolments had been rejected when 800 million numbers had been issued, i.e. over 10% enrolments had been rejected. In a meeting on 5 September 2016, a UIDAI-India Stack person (Chatham House rules stop me from naming him) made a surprising admission: that there is no feedback loop which helps them understand the reasons for rejection! They may be people who have been wrongly rejected, but there is no system in place to find out and remedy errors.

Given the evidence that has been accumulating over the past seven years, what is it that prompts Rajiv Anand, the banker, to call the Jan Dhan, Aaadhaar, Mobile (JAM) layer as ‘the best digital infrastructure’?¹⁴ And if this is the best oughtn’t we to be really worried?

Mohandas Pai and Pranav Pai suggest¹⁵ that all children be tracked through time and activity, using the UID number. They talk of students being ‘enrolled and empowered with a unique identity’; of student’s achievements’; of a UID linked bank account as ‘another powerful enabler.’ A ‘universal data locker’ is to ‘store their digitised documents – from their birth certificate and immunisation histories to their grades, transcripts, marks cards and certifications. Standards for recording grades, exam performance, attendance and certifications will contribute to the reusability and machine readability of all these different dimensions of a student’s education.’ A UID-linked bank account is to build a database of the student’s financial history. ‘Everything from student loans to scholarship programmes will benefit from a richer financial history of the student population. It is about making the ‘data highly reusable in every aspect of the students’ lives in their future careers.’

There is no irony in this rendition. Perhaps not even malice. But there is, clearly, no respect for the privacy of the individual, through time and activity; and a deliberate attempt to make all life seem full of achievement and enablement! And there is an unsullied endorsement of the contempt with which the UIDAI and the government have been treating the orders of the court. It is no secret that the Supreme Court has said, six times – on 23 September 2013, 26 November 2013, 24 March 2014, 16 March 2015, 11 August 2015 and 15 October 2015 – that UID cannot be mandatory for any service and no service can be denied to persons only because they are not enrolled on the database. The UIDAI, and the governments at the Centre and in the states, have acted as if these orders do not exist. The last two orders restricted the use of the UID to six services, including PDS, LPG, NREGA, JDY, pensions and Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation, and said:¹⁶ ‘We will also make it clear that the Aadhaar card scheme is purely voluntary and it cannot be made mandatory till the matter is finally decided by this court one way or the other.’ The case is still pending, while violations abound. These violations of the orders have been deliberate.

On 14 September 2016, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court stayed UGC’s circular making UID mandatory for application for scholarships, citing the 15 October 2015 order. Now, the violations in other fields continue.

In August 2015, the Attorney General told the court that the people of this country do not have a fundamental right to privacy; that question now waits to be heard and decided by a Constitution Bench.

In March 2016 the government introduced the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill 2016 as a ‘Money Bill’ – so that the Rajya Sabha could do nothing to change or reject any of its provisions. This now stands challenged in the Supreme Court by Major General Sudhir Vombatkere and Bezwada Wilson. Jairam Ramesh too has gone to court on this matter.

The cases before the court particularly address questions of tracking, profiling, convergence of data, surveillance, privacy, exclusion, security that is compromised by creation of such a centralized database, national security concerns around contracts for maintaining the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR) to companies with credentials that include their close relationship with the CIA, Homeland Security and the French government.

There is, of course, more; much more. Just as a case in point, when the government demands that we ‘seed’ the UID number in every database, that is plainly illegal, apart from being dangerous. It is not only against the orders of the court, but the 2016 Act nowhere allows ‘seeding’ – it only speaks of authentication. So under what authority is it being demanded that we embed the UID number in multiple databases? Or does the government see itself as beyond the law? Private companies have begun operating business built around the UID. And India Stack, mentored by Nandan Nilekani through iSpirt¹⁷ is rushing to create apps on the UID platform¹⁸ even before the court can tell them whether the UID may or may not be so used.

It is significant that those espousing these technologies have shown scant respect for the rights of the people, parliamentary process, judicial orders, or the norm of executive conformity to the rule of law. Maybe, that the court has not sent anyone to prison for contempt has emboldened those committing flagrant violations.

At least three companies – TrustID,¹⁹ OnGrid²⁰ and BetterPlace²¹ – have already begun work on using the UID number to collect data about the working classes – drivers, cooks, tutors, maids, for instance, with an emphasis on migrant workers – and profiling them as a paid service to employers. Fintech companies are set to be launched, and the catch phrases are that they will be ‘cashless, paperless and presenceless’, with a ‘consent layer’, and be accomplished through e-sign, eKYC and a Digital Locker. There is much to interrogate in these terms. Think about what ‘presenceless’ could possibly mean, when neither the creditor nor the credit receiver will be in the transaction except virtually – and we are told that this will drastically reduce transaction costs and assure returns.

At the centre of this imagination is the e-KYC. Before you think that the ‘C’ has anything to do with the citizen, let it stand clarified – KYC is ‘know your customer’. This is how the citizen gets transmogrified into the customer to become a creature for the market, identified and profiled by technology controllers.

Rajiv Anand uses a phrase which we hear much too often in very recent times, and whose meaning we know not much; ‘from a data poor nation to a data rich nation.’ So, how does techno-utopia envision this? ‘Finally as India goes from being data poor to data rich in the next 2-3 years… And as data becomes the new currency, financial institutions will be willing to forego transaction fees to get rich digital information on their customers. The elimination of these fees will further accelerate the move to a cashless economy as merchant payments will also become digital.’²²

These are the rocks on which our freedom may be wrecked; which is why it is imperative to ask: who benefits from the digital dividend? And who loses? And what?

Usha Ramanathan

 

Footnotes:

1. The term ‘UID number’ is used in this article except where an information source uses the term ‘aadhaar number’ or ‘aadhaar’. The term ‘UID’ is used to avoid confusion with the Adhar Trust that Nandan Nilekani and Rohini Nilekani set up to fund his earlier venture into a government function, when he was in the Bangalore Action Task Force: http://articles. economictimes. indiatimes.com/2002-10-13/news/27329961_ 1_batf-bangalore-agenda-task-force-urban-governance. The UID project was renamed the Aadhaar project after the UIDAI avowedly had a nationwide competition to find a logo and a brand name.

2. PTI, Slogan of ‘Bijli, Sadak, Pani is Passe’: Nilekani in The Hindu, 14 February 2010 at http://www.thehindu.com/news/ national/slogan-of-bijli-sadak-pani-is-passe-nilekani/article106404.ece

3. Kentaro Toyama, Geek Heresy. PublicAffairs, NY, 2015.

4. Ibid., p. xvi

5. Ibid., p. 20.

6. Ibid., p. 30.

7. Ibid., p. 44.

8. Ibid., pp. x-xi. In a footnote, he explains: There is a chance that the poverty rate has been flat because non-technological forces were increasing the rate of poverty from 1970 to now, while technology was actually reducing it during the same period, and the two faces cancelled each other out. But that, he says, may only indicate that we need to pay more attention to social forces than to technological ones. Fn. 13 at p. 226.

9. Ibid., pp. x-xi.

10. Pallavi Polanki, ‘India’s Vanishing Fingerprints Put UID in Question’ http://www.firstpost.com/politics/aadhar-indias-vanishing-fingerprints-put-unique-identity-in-question-11514html

11. Anumeha Yadav, ‘To Pass Biometric Identification, Apply Vaseline or Boroline Overnight’, The Hindu, 17 December 2012 at http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/to-pass-biometric-identification-apply-vaseline-or-boroplus-on-fingers-overnight/article4200738.ece

12. R Krishna Kumar, ‘How the Biometric System has Failed Hard Working People’, The Hindu, 14 September 2013, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/how-the-biometric-system-has-failed-hard-working-people/article5125374.ece

13. Anumeha Yadav, ‘Rajasthan Presses on With Aadhaar After Fingerprint Readers Fail: We’ll Buy Iris Scanners’, Scroll, 10 April 2016, http://scroll.in/article/806243/rajasthan-presses-on-with-aadhaar-after-fingerprint-readers-fail-well-buy-iris-scanners

14. Rajiv Anand, ‘Disruptive Technology and the Financial Sector’, Seminar 687, p. 30.

15. Mohandas Pai and Pranav Pai, ‘Disrupting Education’, Seminar 687, p.34.

16. Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India Writ Petition (Civil) 494 of 2012 dated 15 October 2016 (Constitution Bench).

17. See http://www.ispirt.in/who-we-are/Our-People and http://www.indiastack.org/

18. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGM5TvAUF00 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_1Fv9Dc2M&t =2668s

19. https://www.trustid.in/

20. https://ongrid.in/#/home https://ongridsite.wordpress.com/

21. http://forbesindia.com/article/special/verifying-indias-urban-poor-to-a-better-place/44213/1 

22. Nandan Nilekani, Foreword: The US$ 600 Billion Opportunity, in Credit Suisse, Indian Financials Sector, 29 June 2016, p. 5.