UIDAI Aadhaar, on expanding gives us ‘Unique Identification Authority of India’, but there seems to be nothing unique about the Aadhaar cards that they are issuing. In a village in Dehradun, all members of the village have received their Aadhaar cards with the same birthdate. All members of the village have their birthdate declared as 1st of January, irrespective of actual dates of birth. Before one shrugs this off as a one-off affair, we would like to point out that this is not the first time that UIDAI has made such an error.

The villagers said that despite providing their voter IDs and ration cards such errors have been made. Owing to the manner in which Aadhaar has been forcefully systematically embedded into people’s lives, at times the daily subsistence depends on the smooth functioning of the UIDAI system. As recently witnessed in Jharkhand, the non-linkage of Aadhar to a family’s food rations meant death for a child, while the BJP shamelessly blamed malaria for the same.

But, as has been the case for three years now, insufficient policy planning, poor strategy, and implementation failures are common hallmarks of the Modi government. Moving clear of the regular lapses of the state, and analyzing the overarching policy of Aadhaar, we find that the lines between an ideal welfare state and a surveillance state are fast disappearing. The simple fact of placing conditions on food entitlements goes against the very definition of a welfare state. Mandating Aadhaar for the Mid-Day Meal scheme had faced justifiable uproar, especially since the shoddy force-feeding of Aadhaar for PDS is still fresh in people’s mind. Add this to the technical errors and implementation failures of the government and we have a sure-shot recipe for disaster.

Wide-ranging reports from Gujarat, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and other states revealed that genuine beneficiaries were excluded from food entitlements simply down to problems with the Aadhaar records and authentication issues, besides the flagrant technological and infrastructural cracks of the UIDAI system. Such instances ought to have taught the government that the mere adoption of technology is not a remedy. If plagued with inefficiency and inadequacy in service delivery, it is a sure way of excluding and thrashing the socio-economically vulnerable.

Breaching all ethical as well as legal grounds, the government is trying to bulldoze its way through and shove Aadhaar into every national scheme in India, not to mention in the day to day lives of an individual. The Modi administration, circumventing all constitutional procedures and safeguards, had launched the scheme without putting in place any proper privacy laws, by simply passing the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 as a ‘money bill’. The government also continues to flagrantly defy the Supreme Court’s orders which had disallowed making Aadhaar mandatory for government entitled benefits.

Clearly, a state that wants transparency from its people is not trying very hard to be transparent itself. With such regular oversights, the poor and the vulnerable are left with no means of subsistence. Seeing people die standing in lines, waiting for ration or money, is not just morally wrong but also criminal. Going beyond the political games, the Modi government in such instances simply looks pathetic to an unbiased eye of the common. The founding principle of the UPA launched Aadhaar Bill was to ensure that when government entitlements are distributed, there are no leakages, duplications or falsifications. However, sadly the current programme simply seeks to violate the fundamental constitutional right to privacy of each individual, compounded with a myriad of errors that further propagates the leakages it was initially designed to correct.