Twenty Karnataka government projects have had proposals for Aadhaar authentication accepted, the highest among any state in the country, an RTI (right to information) reply from the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has stated. Among the government projects which now have Aadhaar authentication include the registration of births and deaths, registration of property, and the registrations for a statewide student database covering every student studying in the state. Activists say the push to interlink Aadhaar with various government services is driven by a utopian idea of real-time governance amid privacy concerns and the risk of profiling citizens.
The RTI was filed by Anushka Jain, policy counsel at Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), seeking information on the number of proposals received, denied and approved for Aadhaar authentication. Since the rule change in 2020 enabled government departments to request Aadhaar authentication, several Union government and state government projects have sent proposals to the Union government. Under the rules, authentication is voluntary.
IFF is a New Delhi-based digital rights organisation that seeks to ensure Indian citizens can use the internet with the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.
The RTI response revealed 74 proposals were sent by Union government ministries and 193 proposals were sent by departments under various state governments for Aadhaar authentication. Of these, 48 Union government proposals and 106 state government proposals were accepted. Only 14 proposals in total were rejected. No details were made available for the remaining proposals in the RTI response.
In Karnataka, many crucial government departments have had proposals for Aadhaar authentication approved by the Union government. This includes the registration of births and deaths which comes under the Directorate of Economics and Statistics. It is also being used in the registration of property by the Department of Stamps and Registration.
Other departments using Aadhaar authentication are land-related services, recruitment to government jobs, student registration in school, pre-university and university levels. “The increase in approvals for Aadhaar authentication by various state governments, allows the government to profile people. All the information collated in one place also puts the data susceptible to a data breach,” Anushka Jain, policy counsel at IFF, told TNM.
The RTI sought exhaustive lists of government projects proposed, approved and denied under the Good Governance (Social Welfare, Innovation, Knowledge) Rules, 2020. The rules were introduced without public consultation and it enables any government ministry or department to request Aadhaar authentication for purposes such as “ensuring good governance, enablement of innovation, spread of knowledge etc.” This is even though objections raised in the Supreme Court, particularly about the lack of clarity on the connection between the government’s stated objective and the method to achieve the purpose, remain unaddressed.
The RTI response also showed 48 Union government departments that received approvals for Aadhaar-based authentication in the last three years. These include registration of births and deaths under the Ministry of Home Affairs and even for electoral purposes under the Election Commission of India.
“It paves the way for a very techno-utopian idea of governance, where citizens don’t have to ask for anything and the government will provide it before one demands it. The government knows information about a citizen from birth to death,” digital rights activist Srinivas Kodali said. “It is not that one department linking Aadhaar in isolation is dangerous. It is the entire setup which is dangerous. The government has access to a continuously updated database with a trove of information about its people,” Srinivas Kodali added.
Apart from Karnataka, states like Madhya Pradesh (16 departments) and Maharashtra (10 departments) have also increasingly turned to Aadhaar authentication of services. Activists highlighted how Aadhaar linking could lead to the exclusion of welfare benefits for some people. In Telangana, the government’s move to push for Aadhaar authentication for registration and mutation of agricultural lands and other land services has been fiercely debated, as activists say it has led to the exclusion of small landowners.
The proposals under the Good Governance Rules, 2020 refer to newer proposals for Aadhaar authentication and do not include older efforts to link Aadhaar. In Telangana, the Aadhaar-voter ID linking exercise was linked to large-scale voter deletions of up to 20 lakh people. In Andhra Pradesh, data was reportedly used by the party in power to target voters, with complaints of plans to remove lakhs of voters from electoral lists using this information.