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National Affairs

National Affairs

What are Moody's doubts regarding India's AADHAR?

28 Sep 2023 Zinkpot 184
  • The global rating major Moody’s Investors Service has raised some red flags against India’s Aadhaar program regarding its scrutiny and privacy vulnerabilities in centralized identification systems.
  • These remarks came into significance given the government’s adoption of Aadhaar for providing direct benefit transfers to beneficiaries of official welfare schemes, the MGNREGA scheme, in particular.
  • India’s Aadhaar program is the world’s largest digital ID program that assigns unique numbers to over 1.2 billion Indian residents using biometric and demographic data.
  • Aadhaar aims to integrate marginalized groups and enhance access to welfare benefits. It includes verification methods including fingerprint and iris scans along with alternatives like one-time passcodes.
  • Moody’s stressed the risks of data breaches arising from the accumulation of sensitive information with specific entities. About this, the rating agency made a pitch for decentralized ID (DID) systems such as digital wallets based on blockchain capabilities which give users more control of their private data and can reduce online fraud.
  • Moody’s says the Aadhar system faces obstacles such as the ‘burden of establishing authorization and concerns about biometric reliability’.
  • This New York-headquartered rating agency raised questions regarding the service denials faced and the reliability of biometric technologies especially for manual laborers in hot and humid climates, though it did not provide any evidence to support its assertions.
  •  The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) refuted the claims made by Moody’s stressing that no concrete evidence was provided to support the claims. The agency pointed out that over a billion Indians had utilized Aadhar to authenticate themselves, totaling more than 100 billion times in the past decade.
  • Regarding Moody’s claim of data breaches because of systems centralization, the UIDAI categorically stated that there have been no reported breaches of the Aadhaar database to date. They emphasized that Aadhar’s architecture is characterized by state-of-the-art security measures and its systems comply with global security and privacy standards.

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