IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2015 - 11

be accessible to persons who did
not have a UID number.
Mr. Nilekani has said time and
again that half the population was
expected to be enrolled by the end
of 2014; yet, there have been warnings that people without a UID number may find themselves unable
to access benefits and subsidies
if they do not have it - if a bank
account had not been opened, and
if the UID number were not embedded in the bank account. So, a subsidy for cooking gas, kerosene, and
scholarships, for instance, became
dependent on having a bank
account seeded with the UID, or
Aadhaar number.
From its inception, the UID project has been about creating the
"database resident." The website
of the Department of Information Technology, which has been
renamed as the Department of
Electronics and Information Technology, modestly carrying the acronym DeitY, has said all along that
"Project UID, a Planning Commission initiative, proposes to create a
central database of residents, initially of those above the age of 18
years" [3]. Yet the UIDAI has got
even more ambitious and demanded that everyone, from the newborn
to the oldest resident, be registered on its database. In actuality,
it was always intended to integrate
various databases to construct a
profile of the Indian citizen: "the
project envisages provision of linking of existing databases, as well
as providing for future additions,
by the user agencies" [3]. The MoUs
between the UIDAI and various
registrars that include the state governments, oil companies, banks,
and the Registrar-General of India,
who is in charge of census and the
National Population Register and
socio-economic and caste census,
not only provided for various additional fields of data being collected
MARCH 2015

during enrolment, but also for having the UID number appended to
each respective database.

Questioning Universality,
Uniqueness, and Permanence
in Biometric Collection

When the project got off the
ground, and Mr. Nilekani took
charge, among the early decisions taken seems to have been
the introduction of biometrics. On
September 29, 2009, the UIDAI
set up a committee to review the
state of biometrics in the country,
and to suggest how they may be
modified, extended, or enhanced
to "serve the specific requirements
of UIDAI relating to de-duplication

As for biometrics, documents reveal
that when the decision was made
to use fingerprints and iris for enrollment, there was no knowledge about
whether such biometrics would work
in India given the country's
demographic and environmental conditions. In fact,
it has since been found that
with age fingerprints fade,
The Unique Identifier project
that manual labor makes
fingerprints difficult to
has become an experiment
read, that malnourishmentinduced cataract blights an
conducted on the entire
estimated 8-10 million peopopulation of India.
ple, and so on. The DG and
Mission Director of UIDAI
himself stated in November
2011: "The other challenge
we face is the quality of fingerprints.
and authentication." Interestingly,
Capturing fingerprints, especially of
among its other tasks, the commitmanual laborers, is a challenge. The
tee was asked to "obtain consensus
quality of fingerprints is bad because
(for) widespread propagation of bioof the rough exterior of fingers
metrics in governmental and pricaused by hard work, and this poses
vate sectors" [12]. Significantly, no
a challenge for later authentication....
other means of achieving uniqueIssuing a unique identity will not be
ness and de-duplication was suga major problem. But authentication
gested then, nor at any time since
will be, because fingerprint is the
then; biometrics was the only tool.
basic mode of authentication."
The December 2009 report of
The UDIDAI collects face, fingerthe committee on biometrics was
print, and iris biometric data. The
cautious [13]. The state of knowluniqueness of the UID number is
edge on biometrics was too measaid to be ensured by using the bioger. In its sample of 25 000 people,
metrics collected for "de-duplicat2-5 per cent did not have biometing" the 1.2 billion plus resident
ric records. Globally, de-duplication
population of India. That has always
accuracy of 99 percent had been
sounded like such an improbable
reported from western populations,
task that it cannot do without some
where there was good fingerprint
investigation of why the UIDAI
quality and where the database was
thought they could pull it off. What
up to 50 million. To scale up the
did the UIDAI know about biometresults from 50 million to a billion
rics that gave it the confidence to
plus was fraught with uncertainty.
roll out the project on a nationwide
And, importantly, there had been
scale? The answer is, very little.
no study of fingerprint quality in the
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