Centre for Internet and Society

Aadhaar Bill fails to incorporate suggestions by the Standing Committee

amber — 2016-03-10T15:58:57Z

In 2011, a standing committee report led by Yashwant Sinha had been scathing in its indictments of the Aadhaar BIll introduced by the UPA government. Five years later, the NDA government has introduced a new bill which is a rehash of the same. I look at the concerns raised by the committee report, none of which have been addressed by the new bill.

The article was published by The Wire on March 10, 2016

In December, 2010, the UPA Government introduced the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010 in the Parliament. It was subsequently referred to a Standing Committee on Finance by the Speaker of Lok Sabha under Rule 331E of the the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in Lok Sabha. This Committee, headed by BJP leader Yashwant Sinha took evidence from the Minister of Planning and the UIDAI from the government, as well as seeking the view of parties such as the National Human Rights Commission, Indian Banks Association and researchers like Dr Reetika Khera and Dr. Usha Ramanathan. In 2011, having heard from various parties and considering the concerns and apprehensions about the UID scheme, the Committee deemed the bill unacceptable and suggested a re-consideration of the the UID scheme as well as the draft legislation.

The Aadhaar programme has so far been implemented under the Unique Identification Authority of India, a Central Government agency created through an executive order. This programme has been shrouded in controversy over issues of privacy and security resulting in a Public Interest Litigation filed by Judge Puttaswamy in the Supreme Court. While the BJP had criticised the project as well as the draft legislation when it was in opposition, once it came to power and particularly, after it launched various welfare schemes like Digital India and Jan Dhan Yojna, it decided to continue with it and use Aadhaar as the identification technology for these projects. In the last year, there have been orders passed by the Supreme Court which prohibited making Aadhaar mandatory for availing services. One of the questions that the government has had to answer both inside and outside the court on the UID project is the lack of a legislative mandate for a project of this size. About five years later, the new BJP led government has come back with a rehash of the same old draft, and no comments made by the standing committee have been taken into account.

The Standing Committee on the old bill had taken great exception to the continued collection of data and issuance of Aadhaar numbers, while the Bill was pending in the Parliament. The report said that the implementation of the provisions of the Bill and continuing to incur expenditure from the exchequer was a circumvention of the prerogative powers of the Parliament. However, the project has continued without abeyance since its inception in 2009. I am listing below some of the issues that the Committee identified with the UID project and draft legislation, none of which have been addressed in current Bill.

One of the primary arguments made by proponents of Aadhaar has been that it would be useful in providing services to marginalized sections of the society who currently do not have identification cards and consequently, are not able to receive state sponsored services, benefits and subsidies. The report points that the project would not be able to achieve this as no statistical data on the marginalized sections of the society are being used to by UIDAI to provide coverage to them. The introducer systems which was supposed to provide Aadhaar numbers to those without any form of identification, has been used to enroll only 0.03% of the total number of people registered. Further, the Biometrics Standards Committee of UIDAI has itself acknowledged the issues caused due to a high number of manual laborers in India which would lead to sub-optimal fingerprint scans. A report by 4G Identity Solutions estimates that while in any population, approximately 5% of the people have unreadable fingerprints, in India it could lead to a failure to enroll up to 15% of the population. In this manner, the project could actually end up excluding more people.

The Report also pointed to a lack of cost-benefit analysis done before going ahead with scheme of this scale. It makes a reference to the report by the London School of Economics on the UK Identity Project which was shelved due to a) huge costs involved in the project, b) the complexity of the exercise and unavailability of reliable, safe and tested technology, c) risks to security and safety of registrants, d) security measures at a scale that will result in substantially higher implementation and operational costs and e) extreme dangers to rights of registrants and public interest. The Committee Report insisted that such global experiences remained relevant to the UID project and need to be considered. However, the new Bill has not been drafted with a view to address any of these issues.

The Committee comes down heavily on the irregularities in data collection by the UIDAI. They raise doubts about the ability of the Registrars to effectively verify the registrants and a lack of any security audit mechanisms that could identify issues in enrollment. Pointing to the news reports about irregularities in the process being followed by the Registrars appointed by the UIDAI, the Committee deems the MoUs signed between the UIDAI and the Registrars as toothless. The involvement of private parties has been under question already with many questions being raised over the lack of appropriate safeguards in the contracts with the private contractors.

Perhaps the most significant observation of the Committee was that any scheme that facilitates creation of such a massive database of personal information of the people of the country and its linkage with other databases should be preceded by a comprehensive data protection law. By stating this, the Committee has acknowledged that in the absence of a privacy law which governs the collection, use and storage of the personal data, the UID project will lead to abuse, surveillance and profiling of individuals. It makes a reference to the Privacy Bill which is still at only the draft stage. The current data protection framework in the Section 43A rules under the Information Technology Act, 2000 are woefully inadequate and far too limited in their scope. While there are some protection built into Chapter VI of the new bill, these are nowhere as comprehensive as the ones articulated in the Privacy Bill. Additionally, these protections are subject to broad exceptions which could significantly dilute their impact.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/aadhaar-bill-fails-to-incorporate-suggestions-by-the-standing-committee

Design Public Conclave, 6th Edition

amber — 2016-06-18T16:45:05Z

The 6th edition of the Design Public Conclave was hosted by Civic Labs, an initiative of the Center for Knowledge Studies, and part of the Vihara Innovation Network, in partnership with Social Innovation Exchange, Okapi, Business World, Business World for Smart Cities, and the Delhi Jal Board.

This edition of the conclave was focused on the challenges and opportunities faced by Indian cities. It sought to explore new mechanisms for integrating collaborative dialogue and problem solving into processes of government and citizen interaction. Participants included individuals from organisations such as Okapi, Hyderabad Urban Labs, Fields of View, Innovation Academy, Hewlett Packard, LIRNEasia, among others.

The conclave began with a round of light yoga before moving into the introductory session. Namit Arora, a member of the Delhi Dialogue Commission, who gave the opening remarks introduced some of the subjects to be discussed and raised issues of citizen engagement, massive migration, pollution, unplanned growth, housing, water and power shortage, social problems like sectarianism and crime as some of the challenges faced in civic innovation. He stressed the lack of engagement between public and private parties and the issue of having no sense of commons in civic life in India.

What is Civic Innovation?

The first panel titled “What is civic innovation?” comprised Diastika Rahwidiati from Pulse Lab, Pavan Srinath from Takshashila Institution, Sriganesh Lokanathan from LIRNEasia and Aditya Dev Sood from Vihara Innovation Network. Pavan raised questions about how more people can be involved in civic issues, and spoke about the training program for public governance run by the Takshashila Institution as a means towards that. He also shared the example of Bangalore Political Action Committee, a citizen’s collective that includes several eminent personalities from the city that aims to improve the quality of life in the city. The panel continued to discuss how technology can be harnessed for social activism, and how the data revolution and data sciences can be used for civic innovation. Questions were asked about whether digital activism, such as civic hackathons, is not just a passing fad. A lot of solutions that are only technological in nature, can be misinformed, and so it is essential that other actors are involved along with technologists.

The Vision of a Smart City

Next, Sumit D. Chowdhury from the Ministry of Urban Development, Karuna Gopal from Foundation for Futuristic Cities, Parvathi Menon from Innovation Alchemy, Debashish Rao from HP, Bharath Palavalli from Fields of View and Namrata Mehta from CivicLabs spoke about how smart cities can be built. Parvathi Menon kicked off the conversation by saying that while it is impossible to design smart cities, it is possible to design smart communities. Sumit Chowdhury shared some of the factors that, in his opinion, make a smart city—the creation of scalable infrastructure, transparency in governance, velocity of business and quality of life. A city that can measure itself and use that knowledge to improve itself is a true smart city. Bharat Palavalli chimed in that while technology can make cities more efficient, efficiency can be dangerous. It can become easy to forget who the city is becoming more efficient for. Here, Sumit brought up the example of Shivpur in Maharashtra, where there are water meters in every village, public consciousness about planning and services and timely payment of taxes by citizen to drive the point that smart cities are driven by communities, and technology plays a role in enabling processes and the State in institutionalizing successful solutions. Finally, it was pointed out that under the 100 Smart Cities Initiative, the MoUD does not have a consistent understanding of what smart cities should be.

Dialogue between Society and State

This panel was followed by Elizabeth Elson’s keynote talk, “The dialogue between society and the state.” She spoke about the the power struggle between citizens and the government even in the case of technological application about who brings about change. She shared her experiences from the MAMPU programme. She pointed out some issues faced during the programme like too much focus on symptoms without really understanding the underlying causes, the use of intermediaries, creating mutually empowering coalitions. Elizabeth Elson pointed out that the terms, innovation and technology are used interchangeably . She pointed out that this was problematic as all technological solutions were not innovative. Another important issue that she raised was the need for technological intervention make media more accountable to the society. This session was followed by lunch.

Changing Society and Governments

The next session was moderated by Sumadro Chattapadhyay of Centre for Internet and Society. This panel included Garima Agarwal from Ashoka Innovators, Bangalore and Maesy Angelina from MAMPU programme, Jakarta. The session focussed on what were the appropriate modes of dialogues between civil society, private sector and government. Maesy Angelina focussed on design thinking as one of key methodologies for social innovation. Garima Agarwal emphasised on the importance of developing empathy as an institution. The panel said that while civil society and private sector could continue to point out the issues to the government, very often there is a failure of the government apparatus in that they do not know how to respond to these issues.

Civic Tech Demos

After lunch, there was a small session of brief pitches of examples of civic technological innovations. These include Local Circles, Meri Awaaz, SocialCops, On Track Media and BusBud. The issues that the solutions sought to addressed ranged from citizen engagement, awareness about reproductive issues, MNREGA, public transport and parking. I was reminded of the words of Pia Mancini who felt that she had failed in leveraging technology to solve governance issues as those problems were not technological but cultural. Having said that, a number of the ideas and the desire of use technology to solve social problems were laudable and one hopes to see more applications like these in future.

Breakout Sessions

This was followed by three simultaneous breakout sessions on the following topics – 1) Form and Function: Data Protocols for Civic Innovation, 2) Water Management for Improved Urban Health, and 3) Gaming for Decentralized Waste Management. I was part of the group discussing data protocols for civic innovation. Various question were raised with the implications of open data. One of the recurring themes was the question of ownership of data and who had a rightful claim over it. We broke the discussion down into two heads – risks of data and opportunities for governance and solutions. Among risks, we discussed issues such as privacy risks, chilling effects on free speech, reliability of data, profusion of data without clear insights, social profiling and re-identification of anonymised data. We look at different forms and opportunities for governance including licensing and control, cross linking of data silos, clear guidelines on who controls and owns data. The failure of conventional data protection principles like collection limitation and data minimisation principles were also considered and alternate models which involved having hierarchies of different kinds of data based on potential harm through misuse were discussed. After the breakout sessions, each group made a presentation of their observation.

Concluding

The final session was on accelerating civic innovation. The panel comprised Kartik Desai from ASHA Impact, Delhi, Nishesh Mehta from Water Co-Lab, Ahmedabad, AIyong Paul Seong from USAID, Delhi, Santosh Singh from World Bank, Delhi and Aditya Dev Sood from Vihara Innovation Network. The discussion was focussed on what kinds of services can have an impact on the way citizens interact with the state. Elizabeth Elson’s keynote on the dialogues between the state and the citizens is also relevant with regard to this discussion. Different actors including citizens, civil society actors, government institutions and industry were discussed as agents who may create the new platforms for interaction. The conclave concluded with dinner and drinks in the lawns of the Vihara Innovation Campus.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/design-public-conclave-6th-edition