The Indian government has undertaken a major effort to issue Unique Identification Numbers (UID) to its citizens. This chapter examines the Social Security Number system in the US, and investigates other UID projects in Europe. Based on these understanding and other information around UID systems, the authors discuss possible issues that are expected to arise in the implementation of UID system in India. They articulate how biometrics is being advocated by the proponents of the system in India for unique identification. The authors elucidate the social, ethical, cultural, technical, and legal implications / challenges around the implementation of a unique identification project in India.

The government has been focusing on inclusive growth and has launched several schemes at different levels to facilitate the same. However, monitoring the execution of these schemes and understanding clearly if the targeted citizens actually have got benefited, would demand for substantial granularity of information and doing away with information bottlenecks. Proper execution of the National ID project by the government can prove to be useful for execution of various schemes and projects as well as in accessing multiple government and private sector services. This paper focuses on the need for a single national identity system in India and its proposed execution which may actually be linked to citizen life cycle. The other aspects covered and analyzed include current Indian scenario, challenges, existing identification systems and loopholes in the existing systems. Major challenges seem to be coming from enrolments, technology platform choice and strategic design, corresponding policy and legal frameworks. Considering the mammoth and diverse population, the UID can help with technology platform, smart card technology, legal and administrative framework, business model based on Private-Public Partnership (PPP).

Criticisms and support for the Unique Identification (UID) project have largely hinged on its impact on welfare schemes, privacy of individuals, nature of governance, overall security and confidentiality of information and potential unauthorized access to data, among others. Given that the huge costs of the UID Project would have necessitated serious consultation with the public and adequate cost benefit analysis, the absence of both have generated much controversy. This issue of the Law & Policy Brief scrutinizes the larger project of providing Unique Identification numbers and the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010, that seeks to retrospectively validate the project.

The Unique Identification (UID) or Aadhaar project is the world's largest national identity project, launched by government of India, which seeks to collect biometric and demographic data of residents and store these in a centralized database. Till date, 1176445369 users have enrolled in the system, and the government has spent at least INR 791.24 crore on the project till 31 st January, 2018 (UIDAI Official data 2018). In this article I have highlighted several aspects of Aadhaar Project including the salient features, functional entities and procedure, benefits, disadvantages, enrollment and saturation ratio in different parts of India, money utilization for the project against budgeted figure and also various areas which require Aadhar card as mandatory. The UID project of UIDAI acts as an enabler for the under privileged and migrant population which will empower them with a single identity. It will in turn remove fake and duplicate identities from the system and also plug the leakages in the public distribution system (PDS). The primary mode of identification and authentication will be biometric signature of the enrollee which is unique to every individual. The use of biometrics as an authentication tools has its unique problems as a result of which similar biometric based identity solutions have been shelved in developed countries like U.K., U.S.A. The technological framework for such a large database is not available and it is also mitigated with the lack of privacy and data security law in India.

The recent surge of identification systems globally has revealed the complex, non-uniform and interwoven congregation of policies, industrial and technological standards in the implementation of surveillance systems. This article focuses on the methodological challenges and nuances that scholars face when studying emerging surveillance schemes. We analyse the implementation of the Indian Unique Identification (UID) system, which is the largest implementation of biometric identification in the world. The multimodal biometric system is expected to be a foundation for a wide range of private and public services across the country, and at the same time its systemic structure will allow for comprehensive profiling and tracking of individuals. By analysing the various ways in which identity as a social and scientific category is made known and constructed in the implementation of the UID, we examine how surveillance schemes employ social science methodologies and forefront what implications this has for research.

At various points in its existence, the Indian state has deployed technologies to govern the nation. Recently, the state has undertaken a number of large-scale projects to make use of digital technology. The most controversial of these is the Unique Identity (UID) project, which is registering biometric, along with demographic, information about residents. This paper seeks to understand what is at stake politically in this technological intervention. It aims to explore the political logics and consequences of such a biometric system. It argues that UID re-imagines the economy and the state–citizen relationship as a series of transactions. Theoretically, the main thrust of this paper is to understand the “general economy of power”, as Michel Foucault calls it, which is unfolding in India around the issues of capitalist growth, inequality, social protection and terrorism—and UID signals the technological potential for the convergence of these concerns.

The UID system preserves personally identifiable information (PII) of millions of users on a centralized government database, supported by some legacy software, with numerous SPOF (single points of failures). Such a centralized system, containing PII, acts like a honey pot to hackers. In a country where 2/3rd of the vulnerable citizens, do not have a bank account, but own a smartphone, echoes the possibility of a mobile based digital identity solution. The blockchain technology, by virtue of its key features like decentralization, persistency, anonymity and auditability, emerges as the most promising one amongst all.

Legal identification for all by 2030 is a global strategic goal under the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 16.9). Legal identification is perceived as a critical element in increasing people’s participation in society and providing them with access to services that can improve their quality of life. Aadhaar, India’s digital identity programme, is the world’s largest identity project aimed at providing foundational ID and access to state welfare across the nation. By 2019, 1.2 billion people had a registered Aadhaar card. National and state welfare services, and increasingly, a host of private sector services, are linked to Aadhaar. However, India’s eID programme has faced significant civil and judicial resistance over matters of privacy, fraud, welfare exclusion and surveillance. This technology assessment focusses on evaluating Aadhaar using four lenses: the accessibility of Aadhaar and its impact on welfare distribution, privacy concerns and contestations, security issues ass...