About Article 21 Trust

The adoption of digital technologies for improving citizen-state engagement and providing citizens easier access to government and its functions is certainly necessary, especially in a country the size of India. Yet, the decision-making behind this digitization remains opaque; the average citizen barely gets to know how policies are crafted and who all are consulted. This is especially worrisome in the domain of public welfare wherein techno-solutionism, as in the case of Aadhaar, throws up more problems than those tackled. India’s first attempt at a digital identity verification system, the Aadhaar project, has now been ongoing for nearly a decade.

 

The biometrics-linked 12-digit Aadhaar number was purported to be a welfare enabler, a technological tool to help

identify – uniquely – those receiving welfare benefits and subsidies from the state. The abject reality, however, is that

making provision of the Aadhaar number, or undergoing Aadhaar-based biometric authentication, has furthered and

created several problems in welfare delivery. Those responsible for governing the scheme remain impervious to criticism and have made no attempts to study the impact thereof.

Having made Aadhaar mandatory to access any government service or entitlement, the State has managed to get

Aadhaar numbers seeded into every database creating a gold mine of data that can potentially enable 360º surveillance. We have been told, “Data is the new oil”. In the age of Cambridge Analytica and breaches in the Social Security Number (SSN) database in the US, it is clear that no database, whether maintained privately or by the government, is truly secure. This led us to wonder:

1) Whether a digital welfare state is at all possible that doesn’t result in worsening exclusions and further marginalizing the already marginalized?

2) If so, what sort of digital systems – whether identity and authentication, payments, or governance overall – will be

truly universal in terms of access, secure in terms of maintaining informational privacy, and robust in their implementation across huge geographies and populations? …and…

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3) Most importantly, are such systems desirable and, if so, who controls them and how?

Article 21 Trust is an attempt at seeking answers to these questions while continuing to engage with the present reality

of existing welfare-oriented digital systems as well as the digitization of governance. We aim to conduct conversations

that aim to shape public discussion and thought as well as governmental policy. We will also look to raise funds that

can help shape further study and research, and support legal interventions should they be required. Ultimately, we hope we can build awareness broadly on the sociopolitics of technology, particularly identity technology, whereby people have control over their personal information and data, whose commodification is sought actively by the government as well as private players.