Should the world’s largest biometric system be on blockchain?
This article was originally published in Tech in Asia.
Aadhaar is an Indian government initiative to secure its residents’ rights to have an identity. It is the most comprehensive adoption of biometrics technology by any government in the world.
The system creates unique 12-digit numbers for all Indian residents, which are stored in a central database along with biometrics like fingerprints and iris scans. This secures transactions, as it “anchors” people’s identities to defined metrics, and is used to authenticate loans, pensions, and money transfers across the country.
But while groups like the World Bank champion it as having noble goals, saying it “helps willing governments to promote the inclusion of disadvantaged groups,” critics of Aadhaar have been vocal about its infrastructural flaws for years. Security breaches have reportedly kept growing and “Big Brother” fears linger. Could blockchain help solve this problem?
Criticisms
For all its potential, critics lambaste Aadhaar for enabling the creation of a surveillance state. Academics like German professor Ursula Rao have written extensively on the problems of the initiative. For her, Aadhaar is creating new relations between citizens and the state.
Effectively, Aadhaar is optional — the Indian Supreme Court ruled that enrollment is not mandatory — but it is continually linked to numerous services, including income tax filing. Not using it remains very inconvenient.
Petitioners are challenging Aadhaar in the Supreme Court on numerous grounds. Privacy is one of the concerns, but the manner in which the program was legislated may also have been unconstitutional.
Should a biometric ID database of this magnitude be on blockchain?
If Aadhaar is put on a blockchain, it would be a distributed database, not a central one. But could this work?
A blockchain is a chain of data that is linearly secured using cryptography. Jagdish Pandya (founder of Cryptocurrency Expo) suggests that the database should be on the blockchain. “Right now, all information on Aadhaar is public,” he says. Being able to protect the public information through the integrity of the blockchain is very important for the future of the system. Pandya also says that this should be dependent on the context of the information, for example medical data.
Praneet Kumar (a lawyer-turned-blockchain-evangelist), on the other hand, argues that Aadhaar is a very expensive technology, and integrating it with blockchain could be prohibitive. “The entire migration to blockchain may not make sense,” he says. “But the Indian government is considering migrating certain areas.”
Kumar (who is also the co-founder of the Global Blockchain Foundation) suggests that even if Aadhaar is migrated to the blockchain, security will be ensured:
The entire Aadhar database doesn’t need to come on blockchain. Using an appropriate protocol like Ethereum, we should make a permissioned blockchain, and each node/block will be authenticated by the network. Only user authentication should be migrated to blockchain — this would create a private network to restrict data leakage, as APIs are the key source of data compromise.
While there have been increasing proposals for re-implementing Aadhaar using blockchain technology, there are issues to overcome before blockchain is widely adopted in India.
Still nascent in India
Blockchain is still in its nascent stages in India. Pandya laments, saying he wanted to “make it a credible profession, but there are still many dark places.” According to him, we need to change the psychological mindset surrounding blockchain, as it has been “mis-utilised” by scammers.
Both Pandya and Kumar note that India and Asia at large remain divided as either crypto or blockchain enthusiasts and that Indian crypto exchanges use the name “blockchain” but are not interested in the fundamental technology.
Cryptocurrencies offer incentives for ambitious blockchain technologies. So according to Kumar, “we need to promote the other side.” For example, farmers can be incentivised to ensure grain harvests are transparent by receiving tokens.
The government mood on blockchain is also unclear. “In India, politicians have described cryptocurrencies as a ponzi scheme, and knowledge of blockchain is poor and unclear,” says Pandya. “India is now crawling.” Though Kumar expects some regulatory clarity by the end of May.
He notes that tech should not be controlled or banned by a government. If they are, the place of the ban is usually punished, as other jurisdictions expedite development.
Positive signs
But there has been some support for blockchain implementation. On March 28, the government of Andhra Pradesh (India’s eighth-largest state) announced that it had signed up a private firm to build a blockchain-based DNA database of its 50 million citizens, designed to combat genetic diseases.
JA Chowdary, the IT advisor to the state’s chief minister, Nara Chandrababu Naidu, has been quoted saying:
Every large database breached thus far has been centralised. Blockchain ledgers, on the other hand, are completely distributed. The effort required to hack a decentralised database is titanic and in most cases not even worth the time.
But for others, this is a troubling development. If Aadhaar also has desires for DNA authentication in the future, where could all this lead?
Andhra Pradesh has also become the first Indian state to adopt blockchain for governance. It has piloted two key projects: managing land records and streamlining vehicle registrations. Further, Indian finance minister Arun Jaitley, in his 2018–2019 budget speech, asked Indian government think tank NITI Aayog to prepare a roadmap for blockchain.
NITI Aayog has been encouraging discussions exploring the potential of the blockchain and is said to be aiming for a July 2018 release date.
Greatest human capital development site for blockchain
In April, the Indian state of Kerala built the Kerala Blockchain Academy to train young programmers. This is the first Indian institution to be granted membership by the Hyperledger project hosted by the Linux Foundation.
With enormous programming talent, Kumar expects blockchain could be really important to India’s national development, leapfrogging tech ranks to solve many social and legal issues. According to him, they “aspire to build India into the greatest human capital development site for blockchain.”
A blockchain-based Aadhaar system might provide great momentum for the believers of India’s blockchain community. But for now, the challenges of widespread blockchain adoption remain.
