REPORT ON FUNCTIONING OF THE UIDAI

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• Recently, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India, has pulled up the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) over a range of issues related to the issuance of Aadhaar cards.
• The findings are part of the first performance review by the country’s independent auditor of UIDAI, which was carried out over a four-year period between FY2015 and FY2019.
• The UIDAI is a statutory authority established on 12th July 2016 by the Government of India under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, following the provisions of the Aadhaar Act 2016.
• The UIDAI was initially set up by the Government of India in January 2009, as an attached office under the aegis of the Planning Commission.
• The UIDAI is mandated to assign a 12-digit unique identification (UID) number (Aadhaar) to all the residents of India.
• As of 31st October 2021, UIDAI had issued 131.68 crore Aadhaar numbers.

Issues Highlighted by CAG

• UIDAI has not prescribed any specific proof/document or process for confirming whether an applicant has resided in India for the specified period, and takes confirmation of the residential status through a casual self-declaration from the applicant.
• Also, there was no system in place to check the affirmations of the applicant.
• In India, Aadhaar numbers are only issued to individuals who have resided for a period of 182 days or more in the 12 months before the date of application.
• According to the CAG report, the UIDAI had to cancel more than 4,75,000Aadhaars (as of November 2019) for “being duplicate”.
• This data indicates that on average no less than 145 Aadhaars generated in a day during the period of nine years since 2010 were duplicate numbers requiring cancellation.
• The purpose of the Aadhaar system is that it is unique – that is, no individual can obtain two Aadhaar numbers, and that a specific person’s biometrics cannot be used to obtain Aadhaar numbers for different people.
• UIDAI appeared to have charged people for biometric updates when poor quality data was fed in during enrolment.
• UIDAI did not take responsibility for poor quality biometrics and put the onus on the resident and charged fees for it.
• All the Aadhaar numbers stored in the UIDAI database were not supported with documents on the demographic information of the resident.
• It “caused doubts about the correctness and completeness of resident’s data collected and stored by UIDAI prior to 2016”.

Recommendations

• UIDAI may prescribe a procedure and required documentation other than self-declaration, in order to confirm and authenticate the residence status of applicants, in line with the provisions of the Aadhaar Act.
• UIDAI may tighten the Service Level Agreement (SLA) parameters of Biometric Service Providers (BSPs), devise foolproof mechanisms for capturing unique biometric data and improve upon their monitoring systems to proactively identify and take action to minimize, multiple/ duplicate Aadhaar numbers generated.
• UIDAI may explore alternate ways to capture uniqueness of biometric identity for minor children below five years since uniqueness of identity is the most distinctive feature of Aadhaar established through biometrics of the individual.
• UIDAI may take proactive steps to identify and fill the missing documents in their database at the earliest, in order to avoid any legal complications or inconvenience to holders of Aadhaar issued prior to 2016.
• UIDAI may review charging of fees for voluntary update of residents’ biometrics, since they (UIDAI) were not in a position to identify reasons for biometric failures and residents were not at fault for capture of poor quality of biometrics.
• UIDAI may conduct thorough verification of the documents, infrastructure, and technological support claimed to be available, before on-boarding the entities (Requesting Entities and Authentication Service Agencies) in the Aadhaar ecosystem.
• UIDAI may frame a suitable data archival policy to mitigate the risk of vulnerability to data protection and reduce saturation of valuable data space due to redundant and unwanted data, by continuous weeding out of unwanted data.

SOURCE: THE HINDU,THE ECONOMIC TIMES,MINT