State of Aadhaar biometric auth doesnt help welfare

Published in

Kaarana

4 min readApr 4, 2018

Aadhaar integration into welfare has been fraught with issues, issues that affect the poor and marginalized more than privileged classes.

On 22nd March, UIDAI CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey made a presentation before the Supreme five-judge bench to convince them that all was well with Aadhaar. On slide 42, an extremely important piece of evidence showing the utter failure of ABBA for welfare was allowed to stand without being brought to notice of the learned judges: the percentage of authentication failures.

To wit, a small mathematical jugglery allowed the UIDAI to claim that auth failures measured on interactions with the government (mostly welfare) were as low as 13% from 2016 onwards. In a recent interview, UIDAI CEO was dismissive of the failure rates and called it human error.

However further examination of this innocuous detail reveals the following, much of which researchers, activists and civil society have been pointing out for years:

A. UIDAI’s sleight of hand in calculating the auth failure percentage

UIDAI considers successful authentication to be one that occurs once even after multiple attempts! Thus multiple failures are clubbed together and hidden when a successful authentication event occurs, which then allows UIDAI to claim “only” 13% auth failures. This statistic is of course ethically quite wrong since it completely ignores the hardship and distress faced by people each time ABBA does not work and citizens are required to make multiple trips.

A study of Kerala dairy farmers pension authentication data showed that by UIDAI’s method of calculation, only 9% of pensioners were denied pension. However a deeper look at the data immediately showed that 45% of pensioners’ authentication had failed failed once or more number of times.

B. The actual auth failure percentage is revealed

What should concern all of us are the actual biometric authentication failure rates which are as high as 66%! This is borne out by analysis of 4 separate datasets:

Case 1 - Kerala dairy farmers pension – 66% auth failure

Case 2 – Karnataka PDS study – 62% auth failure

Case 3 - MNREGA and SSP programs from AP – 41% auth failure

Case 4 – Maharashtra PDS data – 60% auth failure

Source: http://164.100.161.157/previousAadharPieChart.

h/t Shyam/@codelust

C. The real impact of authentication failures - Mass distress

A study of the PDS system in Karnataka across 9.6lakh families found that introduction of biometric verification and monthly coupons has made an already cumbersome process unmanageable. People are forced to go multiple times to perform authentication; further they are forced to make visits to higher officials and have to bring a family member along, all of which adds to distress and entails a minimum opportunity cost of Rs 557 / per family / per month. 80% of the beneficiaries face serious issues with the current Public Distribution System.

Govt data shows that 850 – 900 Million people are forced to use ABBA as part of the 139 welfare schemes across India. Extrapolating from the Karnataka PDS study, ABBA is causing distress to nearly 700 million Indians.

D. The real impact of authentication failures - the truly excluded

Coming back to UIDAI’s data on biometric authentication failure, 13%, is a measure of the people who are truly excluded from the system. These are beneficiaries who can never get benefits, irrespective of how many times they try, what UIDAI euphemistically calls “trials”.

Now imagine the double whammy for the truly excluded: they can’t draw benefits due to ABBA issue, and if the situation persists for a period of months, they are removed from the system being labeled a “ghost”. The government in turn falsely then shows these people cut off from welfare they are legally entitled to as “Savings”. Hence over a period of time, UIDAI claims success by virtue of weeding out ghosts and the authentication success % increases.

Problems with Aadhaar biometric authentication

As mentioned earlier, Aadhaar integration into welfare has two distinct issues as analyzed by Reetika Khera (economist and social scientist) in her paper “Impact of Aadhaar in Welfare Programmes”

Aadhaar seeding issues, which is a complex procedure and supposed to be one-time:

Poor not well educated on process and details
Needs still more paperwork & supporting documents
Prone to data entry errors (negligence, uncaring attitude)
Needs periodic re-enrolment of biometrics
No support structure or grievance redressal

ABBA issues:

Due to lack of Aadhaar or seeding
Due to biometric failures
Due to technology failures
Increases transactions cost for eligible people