Schrodinger's Aadhaar in Bihar, it is everything and nothing at the same time

India Today

6 days ago

Numbers can be mysterious. Ask a mathematician. Or ask an UIDAI official, and he will confirm the mysterious properties of the number that we call Aadhaar. It can be described in several ways, with poetic vexations or with something like what the fick, depending on where you have been asked to produce this number, under what circumstances and with what results. Fick You is probably what many people in Bihar are muttering nowadays as they produce their Aadhaar number again and again and are told that the number, despite its 12 digits, means zero, absolutely zero, total nada!advertisementThe story of Aadhar would be comical if it wasn't tragic or hassling for the people of this country. You see, almost 15 years after Aadhaar started making a presence in our lives, no one — not even UIDAI, or Nandan Nilekani, whose brainchild it is — knows the nature of this beast.Way back in 2020, when I was more active on Twitter, one of my tweets went somewhat viral. It went like this: 'Aadhaar is nothing. Aadhaar is everything. Aadhaar is anything UIDAI wants it to be. Aadhaar is the stick. Aadhaar is the carrot. Aadhaar is the cake you can have and not eat. Aadhaar is also the cake you can have and eat. It's Schrodinger's Aadhaar.'
Schrodinger's Aadhaar: The phrase, inspired by Schrodinger's cat that is neither dead nor alive, is not new. It has been bandied about since 2017. I used it in 2018 in one of my tweets. But it struck a particular nerve among Twitter users from India in 2020 because, by then, the Aadhaar number had become the metaphorical Chimera, changing on a daily basis its shape, identity, purpose and use. By 2020, at least those of us who had always seen through its charade had firmly realised that Aadhaar was everything and yet it was nothing.Half a decade later, as the Election Commission of India conducts its voter roll verification in Bihar, we are still trying to find an answer to what is Aadhaar. Decades ago, economist Joan Robinson said that 'Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.' In 2025, we can use the same words to describe Aadhaar. The argument nowadays is that Aadhaar is proof of address, and not identity. This seems rather strange because Aadhaar started as a number that would provide each person a unique identity. The UIDAI itself has a 'unique ID Authority' in its name. When the government created UIDAI, it did so with an express purpose and told it to 'generate and assign UID to residents.' And because it was an ID, it was tied to a person's biometrics, such as fingerprints and eye scans, in ways not even the Indian Passport is linked.Similarly, when the World Bank — or rather World Bank economist Paul Romer — described Aadhaar, it was deemed 'the most sophisticated ID programme in the world.' The same people who are now saying that Aadhaar is not an identity proof and that it is just an address proof, are the ones who until a year ago would slam the certificate from Romer — but described as a certificate from the World Bank — in the faces of Aadhaar detractors.advertisementThis has been Aadhaar's story throughout its existence. The number might have been born out of the necessity of identifying actual MGNREGA beneficiaries, its purpose and characters have changed again and again to suit the whims and fancies of this government department or that.In fact, seeing how government departments use it, it has also been captured by private individuals and private organisations, who use it without any oversight or proper guidelines. The result is that Aadhaar is used in 10,000 ways. It is demanded by security guards when you enter a residence complex. It is demanded by guards at the airport. It is demanded by the courier services when their porters come to deliver goods. It is demanded by banks. It is demanded, in various ways and for sundry purposes, by almost all government departments. It is even demanded when you go to a hospital, are laid on to a stretcher and rushed into an emergency room.The Supreme Court, in 2017, limited its scope, but the march of Aadhaar continued left-right, left-right and centre. The government, in almost all its communication on the matter, has deemed Aadhaar not mandatory because by the law, as explained by the Supreme Court, it can't be mandatory for anything.advertisementYet, walk into any government department for any citizen service, from registry of property to setting up a business, and the first thing that is 'mandatory' is Aadhaar. The contradictions run deep and wild, and in hilarious ways. The UIDAI says that we should never provide a copy of Aadhaar to anyone. You see, Aadhaar is supposed to be just a digital number, which can only be used in conjunction with a biometrics machine for authentication purposes in some very specific settings. Yet, the same authority allows people to create these cool-looking cards with the Aadhaar number on them, which are then demanded at every nook and corner of the country by this person or that.In principle, I am opposed to a number becoming a defining identity of a person. Any number. My objections are the same which led Yevgeny Zamyatin to write We, a novel that, in 1921, became one of the first books to be banned by communist Soviet Russia. The novel, which explores a totalitarian society structured on the basis of science and mathematics, assigns every citizen a number. There are no names because names lead to an individual identity, free and unique, whereas 'We' is all about uniformity and conformity. And, of course, a number makes surveillance easy.advertisementBut I also understand this is a utopian idea. In this time of Dataism, which Yuval Noah Harari calls the religion of the 21st century, a national number of residents can have its uses. For example, the Social Security Number in the US. So, we can have a use for something like Aadhaar. India is a big country. It is also rather chaotic, with bureaucracy and paperwork drowning everyone and everything. A national number can help us.Sadly, the problem in India is that even the best ideas have a habit of turning into a nightmare here. There are a number of reasons for that, but in the case of Aadhaar, it is due to plain avariciousness of the government as well as private companies that want a unique identifier to link all the data together.Instead of being a tool for a specific purpose, Aadhaar, by design, has been turned into a digital monster, a sort of Cthulhu that has tentacles in everything. And because it is supposed to exist and be used everywhere, in 2025, it no longer has any sanctity to serve any purpose. This is the reason why it is accepted everywhere now but is not considered a serious document anywhere. This is also the reason behind the flip-flop on Aadhaar. One day it gets accepted, the next day it might not.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)- Ends(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Must Watch