Government admitting it misled people into linking mobile number with Aadhaar is not its only lie
For some reason, Aadhaar has been a project that the governments of all political hues have defended vehemently. It was the UPA government that reared the monster and now it's the NDA that is feeding it. In the midst of this, Aadhaar and its data has found favours from the state government.
From Kerala to Madhya Pradesh, everyone has rushed to claim the (mostly non-existent) benefits of Aadhaar. Now as the constitutional challenge to the whole Aadhaar programme progresses in the Supreme Court, it is now being revealed the governments, and most particularly the NDA government, which is in the habit of misleading people on the nature, utility, benefits and risks of Aadhaar.
The most egregious of these claims - and the one that unravelled recently to the utter shame of the Modi government - has been the argument that Aadhaar-mobile number linking was an exercise ordered by the Supreme Court.
Whenever people pointed towards the absurdity and frustration of re-verifying and linking phone numbers with Aadhaar number, the government officials - and even ministers - said that they understood the ordeal, but it was due to the Supreme Court order.
So seriously has the government peddled this line that when the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) issued the order to telecom companies to complete Aadhaar-mobile phone linking it said this was done specifically on the orders of the government.
The problem is that while the Supreme Court indeed ordered verification exercise, it didn't say Aadhaar was the only requirement. This is the point that the SC bench hearing Aadhaar case raised with the UIDAI lawyer a few days ago. "In the Lokniti Foundation case, the SC has not directed linking of SIM with UID. But the Union government's circular says so. There was no such direction from the Supreme Court, but you took it and used it as tool to make Aadhaar mandatory for mobile users," justice DY Chandrachud reportedly said. The lawyer agreed that the Supreme Court didn't specifically issue the orders to link Aadhaar with SIM cards.
In a way that is one government lie caught. But then there are many more such instances where the government has tried to misled people on Aadhaar. The most infamous of these is that World Bank reference that notes that Aadhaar results in saving of $11 billion per year. This figure, put in a report by World Bank on the basis of an incomplete reference, has been debunked several times.
For example Reetika Khera, economist and professor at IIT Delhi, has debunked it several times. Writing in 2016, she said: "To see how the $11 billion potential savings were estimated, I looked up the source. It lists India's cash transfer programmes (NREGA, pensions, etc) and says, 'The value of these transfers is estimated to be Rs 70,000 crore ($11.3 billion) per annum.' This gives an altogether new meaning to 'savings': an elimination of the entire budget on cash transfers."
Despite the debunking though, UIDAI officials as well as ministers love citing the World Bank figure to justify Aadhaar.
Then there have been statements made in the Supreme Court in the last few weeks which not only stretch the truth to defend Aadhaar but also fly in the face of what we are seeing in reality. Almost all "savings due to Aadhaar" claims are suspect.
For example, recently on the claims of crores of rupees of savings in LPG distribution due to Aadhaar, International Institute for Sustainable Development wrote in a report: "Putting aside the relative merits of Aadhaar as a public policy tool, our calculations indicate that, instead of resulting in significant savings, the net fiscal impact of integrating Aadhaar into DBTL in the current financial year was likely to be minimal, and that expectations of substantial net savings in subsidy expenditure from the introduction of the Aadhaar scheme may be misplaced."
Then there are hilarious attempts to out-rightly (or ignorantly) lie about the security and misuse of Aadhaar. Or grossly inhuman way in which poor are treated in case of lack of Aadhaar or its authentication failure.
For example, lawyers defending the government and UIDAI have argued that there is not a single person in the country who has been denied benefits because of the lack of Aadhaar. This when there have been reports of people dying because they were refused their share of ration just because their old and wrinkled fingerprints couldn't be read by Aadhaar machines.
There are claims that there has been no security breach in Aadhaar data and that its servers are safe because they are behind five-feet-thick and 13-feet-high walls. This when almost daily a French security researcher on Twitter finds big bugs in Aadhaar and tweets about it. Similarly, people have been seemingly misled on how much data agencies like a private party get whenever they use Aadhaar for verifying someone.
And there have been tall claims made about how UIDAI can't use Aadhaar technology for surveillance, where it is easy to see that Aadhaar is a surveillance technology for all practical purposes.
The Aadhaar case in the Supreme Court is now, hopefully, in the last stages. In another couple of weeks or so we may get a verdict. But irrespective of the verdict, do remember that to defend Aadhaar the government didn't only rely on facts. It also relied on the words and claims that were at worst misleading and at best disingenuous.