Aadhaar: Platform over Troubled Waters
The chapter offers a critical account of Aadhaar as an identity authentication platform and its evolving narrative in relation to its deployment by banking, telecom and other private entities in India. The sources for this chapter include the B.N. Srikris
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Aadhaar: Platform over Troubled Waters Pawan Singh
The chapter offers a critical account of Aadhaar as an identity authentication platform and its evolving narrative in relation to its deployment by banking, telecom and other private entities in India. The sources for this chapter include the B.N. Srikrishna Committee Report on data protection, Personal Data Protection draft bill, statements made by various members of the Parliament (MPs) in the Rajya Sabha during the passage of the Aadhaar Amendment Bill 2019 and media reports. I will begin by providing an overview of the Aadhaar privacy debate from 2012 to 2018, paying attention to the petitions filed in support of Aadhaar’s use by the private sector. I will subsequently examine the positions of pro-Aadhaar groups, who which see Aadhaar data as a kind of “new oil” that can fuel economic growth through digital innovation. These countervailing positions represent efforts to manage the crises of legibility and credibility in order to rationalise the use of Aadhaar through the language of constitutional values, social progress and nationalism. These debates allow us to identify the key values that have emerged from the contestations around data protection in India, and which may prove vital to salvaging the P. Singh (*) Australia India Institute, Carlton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India, Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_10
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Aadhaar project, addressing other crises of confidence and ensuring the protection of citizen data shared across public and private contexts of the platform economy. The 2009 launch of Aadhaar, the Indian government’s biometric identity project, ushered in a new regime of identification, especially for the economically marginalised populations, who were previously understood to be invisible, outside the legitimacy of a valid identity (UIDAI 2010). The project was implemented as a voluntary scheme for the poor to enable their access to welfare in a corruption-free, transparent manner directly using their fingerprints and other biometric markers. Over a period of time from 2012 onwards, Aadhaar became embroiled in legal challenges pertaining to its potential for creating a surveillance state through possible violations of the right to privacy, an affordance that was at the time yet to be codified in the law as a fundamental right. The 2012 challenge by a retired Karnataka judge filed in the Supreme Court of India led to two landmark decisions: the first came in 2017, codifying privacy to be a fundamental right subject to certain limitations guaranteed by the Indian Constitution, also called the Puttaswamy judgement (Supreme Court of India 2017). The other followed in 2018 by the same court that upheld the constitutional validity of Aadhaar as mandatory for access to welfare schemes by the poor while exempting the non-welfare u
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