March 30, 2018
The Interim Order issued by the Supreme Court on 13th March come as a grave disappointment, given the large scale exclusion and cases of starvation deaths reported due to ABBA (Aadhaar Based Biometric Authentication), from the poorest districts of the country. The deadline was not relaxed for notifications under Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act, 2016 that practically make it a requirement to link Aadhaar for people to continue to have access to 139 crucial welfare schemes, several of which are citizens’ legal rights.
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:
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.
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%
Case 2 – KA PDS study – 62%
Case 3 – MNREGA and SSP programs from AP – 41%
Case 4 – Maharashtra PDS data – 60%
— source rethinkaadhaar.in