‘Moody’s Opinion Is Baseless’: India Reaffirms Confidence In Aadhaar
India defends Aadhaar technology after the US based rating agency ‘Moody”s’ came up with arguments highlighting the concerns about it like establishing authorisation and biometric reliability. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) issued a strong rebuttal and said, “”A certain investor service has, without citing any evidence or basis, made sweeping assertions against Aadhaar, the most trusted digital ID in the world. Over the last decade, over a billion Indians have expressed their trust in Aadhaar by using it to authenticate themselves over 100 billion times”.
The Moody”s report does not cite either primary or secondary data or research in support of the opinions presented in it, and also incorrectly cited the number of Aadhaar’s issued as 1.2 billion, although the website prominently gives the updated numbers, a statement from the union government said.
The system often results in service denials, and the reliability of biometric technologies, especially for manual laborers in hot, humid climates, is questionable, Moody said it in its report. And this was countered by the government by saying that payments to workers under schemes like the country”s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) are made by directly crediting money in their account and does not require the worker to authenticate using their biometrics.
Moody’s report completely ignored the biometric submission which is possible through face and iris authentication and the possibility to use mobile OTP for authorisation, the government said.
The report also highlighted the fact that till date no breach has been reported from Aadhaar card database. And further, Parliament has laid down robust privacy protections in the law governing the Aadhaar system and these are observed through robust technological and organisational arrangements. The systems are also certified as per international security and privacy standards, the statement said.
Recently, the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI), in a report prepared by the World Bank, has stated that the “implementation of DPIs such as Aadhaar (a foundational digital ID system), along with the Jan Dhan bank accounts, and mobile phones, is considered to have played a critical role in moving ownership of transaction accounts from approximately one-fourth of adults in 2008 to over 80 percent now—a journey that it is estimated could have taken up to 47 years without DPIs” the UIDAI said.
The Aadhaar card, which is issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), has a unique number tied to an individual”s fingerprints, face, and eye scan.
