IIMA prof’s study finds loopholes in UID project - Indian Express

IIMA prof’s study finds loopholes in UID project - Indian Express

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Adam HallidayTags : UID Project, IIM-A, Rajanish DassPosted: Wed May 18 2011, 04:42 hrs
http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/assets/snippets/workingpaperpdf/5463926942011-03-04.pdf

Says need for review as concept involuntary in nature

The ambitious Unique Identification (UID) Project has broad gaps that need review, a study by a professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) suggests.

The study has attributed inputs from seven institutes (including IITs, IIMs, and law universities), quotes from 46 documents and lists 11 papers as references.

Titled ‘Unique Identity Project in India: A divine dream or a miscalculated heroism’, the paper was written in March by Professor Rajanish Dass of IIMA’s Computer and Information Systems Group.

Dass illustrated the increasingly involuntary nature of UID. While the project’s concept note said enrollment would not be mandated, it also says the benefits and services linked to it would ensure demand for it.

“This is like selling bottled water in a village after poisoning the well, and claiming that people are buying water voluntarily,” he wrote, adding that the UID Authority of India says it is voluntary but governments can make it mandatory.

“The Planning Commission’s proposal for the National Food Security Act argues for ‘mandatory use of UID numbers...’, which means, ‘No UID, no food’,” Dass noted while giving an example.

Besides, there has been no clear evidence of claim either from the government or from the UIDAI about the total cost of the project, Dass wrote, pointing out replies to five parliamentary questions have evoked inconsistent figures.

Inconsistencies apart, “there is no indication of any cost benefit analysis... The only response to a question raised in the Lok Sabha about the the same was that ‘the benefits accruing out of the project should far outweigh the cost of the project’.”

Dass has quoted Delhi-based “researcher on jurisprudence, poverty and rights” Usha Ramanathan as saying that the UID’s self-sustainability would mean that “it is going to be a profit-making model riding piggy-back on public money and social sector schemes”.

He has further written that the project is expected to create 3.5 lakh jobs and “result in a commercial opportunity of $20 billion in the first five years, and from the sixth year onwards, $10 billion annually”.

Technology-wise, the UID would collect demographic details of each person including “biometrics of all 10 fingers, along with the iris scan of both the eyes and the photo of the face”.

“Around five megabytes of data will be required to store the compressed fingerprint images (of all the 10 fingers) of each individual, requiring the size of the entire database to be at least six petabytes (6,000 terabytes, or 6,000,000 gigabytes),” he wrote.

He identified two main problems. The technology is untested: “UIDAI’s Biometrics Standards Committee has noted that retaining biometric efficiency for a database of more than one billion persons ‘has not been adequately analysed’ and the problem of fingerprint quality in India ‘has not been studied in depth’.”

“Another concern is that marketeers will find ways to build profiles of people based on how they use their IDs,” Dass wrote. He quoted a Professor of the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), Kolkata as saying, “You will basically be creating these wonderful resources for people to mine.”