Aadhaar or Not?

The total number of Aadhaar enrollment has reached a level of around 600 million. There are serious debates in the public domain about use of Aadhaar as mechanism to establish and verify identify for various subsidies and benefits extended to the residents of this country. Let us take a deep look at the merits and demerits of this idea.

Every entity that provides any benefit or service to a person has a need to establish the identity of the recipient at the time of enrollment into the scheme. It would also want to verify if the same person is receiving the benefit/ service every time the service is availed. For this purpose different entities use different methods and different supporting documents.  Aadhaar comes out as the best identity proof on account of the following.

·         Most of the identity documents that are commonly used like PAN card, Voter Id, passport, electricity bill and so on are only enrollment proof for a specific service. Therefore this limits the cross section of residents who can have each of these documents. This makes it essential for every service provider to allow a variety of identity document resulting in higher cost and risk. Aadhaar is issued by UIDAI which has been set up only for the purpose of issuing an identity documents to every resident. This makes it possible for every resident to receive an identity documents.

·         Aadhaar has established a centralised system and a standard process that is accessible throughout the country to verify the identity document submitted by the recipient of the service. This makes it easy for every service provider to establish uniform but strong verification mechanisms instead of establishing multiple verifications for various identity documents.  No other identity document has such a seamless verification process in place (many of them don’t give a facility to verify from the source if the identify document has been truly issued by the issuing entity) which makes it possible for the unscrupulous to get away with forged identity documents.

·         The above process also significantly reduces the cost and risk of identity verification.

Every service/ benefit provider could want to ensure that same person does not access the service under multiple identities. Aadhaar issues a unique number to a person supported by extremely strong biometric technology to ensure that one person cannot have multiple identities. The current practice of establishing uniqueness with demographic data like name, father’s name, age etc  is quite weak in comparison with this. No other identity document has such strong de-duplication mechanism in place to ensure that same person has multiple identities

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The issuing authorities for the various documents used as proof of identity have established their channel for enrolment to meet their requirement and they do not cater to the need and right of every resident to receive an identity document. For example voter id is issued to eligible voters. PAN is a tax id and tax department has no incentive to extent this as a service to all residents. Since UIDAI is established as an entity to issue identify document, it has established extensive channel for issuance and verification and is in the process of further extending this channel.

This helps any entity which has to uniquely identify a person to save significant cost and effort in the identity verification process.  Building on this Axis bank now has introduced scheme wherein an individual can walk into any Axis Bank Branch, give his / her UID and after verification of the same, the banks issues an account without any further document.  Many service providers are figuring our innovative application of this idea. With more than 600 million cards already established we can soon witness wider adoption.

But let us be clear; only thing Aadhaar can guarantee is a unique identity, nothing else. Not citizenship, not right for any entitlement. For any of these you will need other mechanism. So we should judge and decide based on what Aadhaar can do and its relevance, and not what it cannot!

“No one  can stop an idea whose time has come” Victor Hugo