By Rina Chandran
MUMBAI, Dec 13 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – When Parash, an HIV-positive man, went to a government hospital in Delhi a few months ago to get his medication, he was turned away.
He did not have an Aadhaar, a biometric identity card with a unique identification number issued by the Indian government.
The 27-year-old had earlier showed his driver’s licence or voter card to get his anti-retroviral therapy (ART) drugs at a charity, but the hospital did not accept these as proof of identity. They insisted on his Aadhaar.
“The medications are my lifeline. I have other government IDs – passport, driver’s licence, a voter ID, but without Aadhaar, I am nothing to the state,” said Parash, who declined to give his last name.
India launched Aadhaar, now the world’s biggest biometric database, in 2009 to streamline welfare payments and reduce wastage in public spending.
Since then, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been keen to mandate the use of Aadhaar for everything from filing income taxes to the registration of mobile phone numbers and booking railway tickets.
Campaigners and technology experts have raised concerns about privacy and the safety of the data, the susceptibility of biometrics to failure, and the misuse of data for profiling or increased surveillance.
Aadhaar is now mandatory for welfare, pension and employment schemes, despite a 2014 Supreme Court ruling that it cannot be a requirement for welfare programmes.
Parash suspects his experience is not an isolated case.
“I have heard of others – sex workers and transgender people – who have been denied ART because they did not have Aadhaar or because they did not want to give (their data) because they are scared of being outed and linked to other databases,” he said.
SURVEILLANCE STATE
More than 1 billion people of India’s 1.25 billion population have been issued the 12-digit Aadhaar, which uses personal data, fingerprints and iris scans to identify them.
“An eco-system is being created where we don’t have control of our own data and where a single identifier – the Aadhaar – links all databases and becomes a tool for profiling and surveillance,” said Reetika Khera, an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi.
“There is rampant interlinking of discrete databases without data protection,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
An Aadhaar, which means “foundation” in Hindi, speeds up transactions such as opening bank accounts and getting new mobile phone contracts, doing away with middlemen and potential fraudsters, the government says.
Banks, mobile services companies and airlines can access parts of the Aadhaar database to verify identities.
Companies could also share information on a person’s spending and consumption habits, for example, and link the data to public records like the electoral register.
