I went to a startup conference over the weekend (24 June) and chatted up a host of familiar faces. Many conversations inevitably turned towards Aadhaar. I heard two recurring sentiments:

Aadhaar is fundamentally a good idea, whatever the current problems may be. It is a mistake for tech entrepreneurs to get involved with government.

I respectfully disagree with both sentiments and I’d like to explain why. Be warned, tech jargon ahead.

Technology is only a tool

We in the tech community recognise this implicitly when it comes to our own work. Take JavaScript for example: over the last 15 years, the language has transformed from being a gimmick into a serious ecosystem that underpins much of how the modern web works. We even remember the most important milestones of this transformation:

The first rich web apps, Gmail (2004) and Google Maps (2005) API standardisation with jQuery (2006) High performance JS runtimes with the V8 engine (2007) Server-side JS with Node.js (2009) Modern front-end frameworks, AngularJS (2010) and React (2013)

As a tech person building web apps, what did you get when each of these milestones occurred?

Did Gmail and Google Maps make your website a rich web app? Nope, they only offered proof that this was possible. You had to figure out how to do it for yourself. Did including jQuery in your website automatically make your JS better? Nope, you also had to use jQuery. It made coding easier, but you still had to write the code. Did Chrome give your website users a free performance boost? Nope, as a new browser, users weren’t using it, and their current IE or Firefox browsers didn’t magically get a speed boost from Chrome. Users had to consciously switch to Chrome, or wait for their browser makers to upgrade their own JS engines. You as a website developer couldn’t afford to sit back and wait for the world to catch up—unless you simply didn’t care for your competition. Did Node.js give your front-end developers an automatic upgrade to back-end developer status? Nope, the language is just one piece of the puzzle. There was an entire new ecosystem to learn about; a dizzying pace of development that meant everything you knew was obsolete every few months; fractious community relationships that resulted in the IO.js fork and subsequent re-merger; and continued drama and instability with the NPM package manager. Node.js is great, but it only works if you’re an experienced developer who can keep up with all this. Adopted AngularJS because it was backed by Google? Too bad they messed up the API and had to release a backwards-incompatible 2.0. The years you invested into building websites with Angular 1.0 are now your liability to upgrade. Feeling smug because you backed React instead? The Vue.js developers are smirking from their corner.

Let’s face it. Technology is not magic pixie dust that you sprinkle on your problems to make them go away. To solve a problem, you must have the intent to solve the problem, and back it up with sufficient experience and resources. Technology is merely a tool in your resource toolkit. It may be a useful or useless tool, an expensive or cheap tool, or a substitute tool because your preferred tool isn’t available. But it’s a tool in your hands. You matter more.

You didn’t need this lecture. You knew this. Why, then, must you elevate Aadhaar to the status of technology that will magically enable inclusion, solve corruption, and take India into the league of global superpowers? Shouldn’t these things require intent by responsible officials, in whose hands Aadhaar is a tool that may or may not be useful? If, as the refrain goes, there has been no progress for 70 years, exactly how does Aadhaar instill intent in the hearts of apathetic officials? If venture capital can’t turn any idiot into a successful entrepreneur, how will Aadhaar solve any problem by itself?

In 2017 India, Aadhaar has become a hammer in the hands of central government that makes every problem look like a nail. At startup conferences, prospectors have their eyes peeled for an Aadhaar-enabled startup that will become the next unicorn.

As the eminently quotable Jamie Zawinski once said:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

Try s/regular expressions/Aadhaar/

“But I know all this. Aadhaar detractors like you are spreading fear and confusion and hampering responsible officials from using Aadhaar effectively”

Let’s examine this sentiment with one popular use of Aadhaar, for the Public Distribution System (PDS) that distributes subsidised food rations. As is well known, PDS is plagued with inefficiencies and leakages from decades of shoddy implementations.

Under India’s federal structure, almost all citizen interactions are handled by state governments. The central government is—to use technical parlance—a backend services provider that redistributes tax money to support states that need assistance, offers a central forum to resolve disputes, provides common services that all state governments need, and handles foreign relations. Day-to-day life is almost entirely the responsibility of the state government, and that includes the PDS.

Given this structure, whether PDS works or not is a function of how well the state government is organised. The South Indian states report eliminating leakage to over 90%—and that’s before introducing Aadhaar—while Rajasthan has a series of horror stories of people excluded by Aadhaar. In an efficient system, Aadhaar is yet another tool that may improve efficiency, used at the discretion of officials. In a weak system, Aadhaar is a blunt instrument that allows officials to blame the technology’s failings to deflect attention from themselves.

These public officials are not Aadhaar’s detractors on Twitter and in newspaper opinion columns. Those are concerned citizens pointing out the technology isn’t magic.

If PDS is a state subject, and it’s up to state-level authorities to decide if Aadhaar is a useful tool or not, why is the central government pushing for mandatory use of Aadhaar for PDS? What magical results do they expect by imposing a tool? Why does this idea—that Aadhaar is magic—exist? Let’s turn to familiar web tech again.

Technology is often marketed as magic

Look at the website for any popular web framework. Look at how simple they make everything seem. Here are a couple extreme examples (and corresponding criticism):