Aruna Roy, National Advisory Council member and social activist, has said that the Unique Identification (UID) Project, Aadhaar, which is being implemented in the State currently, can be used by a repressive government to target communities, groups or ideologies.
“The problems with the project are many. It began to be implemented even before the law was passed in Parliament. It collects all our data, including irrelevant data, and the storage, we are told, is done by a private agency. It can do anything it wants with it. It can even sell the data,” she cautioned while interacting with journalists here on Sunday.
Ms. Roy, president of the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW), said since it involved commerce, the project was a fertile ground for tremendous corruption “to the scale of which even national security can be impinged.” Further, States could take over the data and use it to target particular communities, ideologies, and gender-based groups. So, this kind of storage of data without transparency and accountability was dangerous.
“While the smokescreen [for implementing the project] is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the public distribution system, it is meant for the Natgrid (National Intelligence Gird). The project endangers citizens' entitlement to privacy and freedom. Besides, the technology used [for data collection] is defective. The project is, therefore, guaranteed to fail,” she said. NFIW general secretary Annie Raja attended the meeting.
