Aadhaar is the infrastructure for good governance, says UIDAI chief

Aadhaar is the infrastructure for good governance, according to Saurabh Garg, CEO of UIDAI — the body that administers this ubiquitous government-issued ID. Garg further said many countries wanted to learn the Aadhaar system from India.

Garg said that while UIDAI only provides the infrastructure for good governance, the actual activity is done by the various agencies, such as PAN, which is linked to Aadhaar. "We provide the infrastructure to be able to verify whether the person is who they claim they are, and the actual activity is done by each agency," Garg added.

He said the UIDAI has reached a point where nearly 100 percent of adult Indian residents have Aadhaar. "A number of countries have come forward, wanting to learn from the implementation and also to look at how it can be implemented in their countries," he said, adding that they get delegations from different countries regularly and the UIDAI is working with different countries and is willing to continue to support them.

Elaborating, Garg said that some countries have already implemented the Aadhaar model with the support of UIDAI's ecosystem partners. "Just to name two, the Philippines and Morocco have worked with our ecosystem partners in the past, who were associated with Aadhaar, and have adopted it," he said.

Garg said there are a number of programmes and schemes that use Aadhaar as the basis of de-duplication and removal of ghost beneficiaries and that the actual benefit of the same is when there is authentication with the Aadhaar ecosystem.

"Mere collection of the 12-digit number is not adequate unless and until that number is authenticated to check whether that person is actually the one they claim they are. That is the only clarification we have given that whenever such kind of usage of Aadhaar is done it would be best if it is re-authenticated by use of the online authentication method. Offline is also possible. So either one people and departments can use to make full use," he said, referring to the recent circular that his department had issued to state and central departments to ensure that there is better governance, understanding, linkage to the subsidy schemes that the Indian government gives.

He assured that the UIDAI's cybersecurity and information security systems are of the highest order. "Our systems in UIDAI in Aadhaar are of the best in class and there is no question of leakage of data. Very often, there are different agencies such as hotels who like to ask for some kind of identification proof and people use Aadhaar as a preferred means of identification. Even in that, our attempt has been to explain to the ecosystem that the benefits of Aadhaar are best obtained when some authentication is done or identification is done. Just  having the 12-digit Aadhaar number in itself doesn't help in identifying anyone unless they authenticate with our database to check if the person is actually that person," he said.