Aadhaar is not perfect but has proven useful

Given how widely Aadhaar has been hailed as a success in biometric identification to enable policy action, the Moody’s critique of it caught many by surprise. It said the credit rating agency had made sweeping assertions against Aadhaar without citing any empirical evidence and had ignored facts about its identity verification options in suggesting that service failures were resulting in wage denial to workers employed under our rural job guarantee scheme. Given these privacy perils, there is merit in fortifying Aadhaar further, as Moody’s suggests, perhaps by adopting decentralized mechanisms that could limit the damage caused by any single break-in. It was designed to provide Indian residents an inalienable digital identity so that welfare benefits could reach properly identified beneficiaries directly, without any transmission loss, and thus help uplift the lives of the needy.