India slams Moody's 'hot, humid' claims over Aadhaar's security and efficiency

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government slammed the claims made by global credit agency Moody's that questioned the privacy and security in India's successful biometric identification project Aadhaar, a 12 digit individual identification number issued to all Indian citizens by the Unique Identification Authority of India.

Moody's claimed that Aadhaar frequently leads to service denials, particularly for manual labourers in hot and humid regions.

The Indian government said that the investor service had made sweeping assertions against Aadhaar without providing any evidence, despite Aadhaar being recognised as one of the world's most trusted digital ID systems.

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"Over the last decade, over a billion Indians have expressed their trust in Aadhaar by using it to authenticate themselves over 100 billion times. To ignore such an unprecedented vote of confidence in an identity system is to imply that the users do not understand what is in their own interest," the government said in a statement.

What did Moody's say?

The New York-headquartered Credits rating agency, in a purported warning, questioned the security and privacy credentials in Aadhaar.

It linked Aadhaar with the risks associated with centralised systems that control user identification credentials and online resource access.

"The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) administers Aadhaar, aiming to integrate marginalised groups and expand welfare benefits access… The system often results in service denials, and the reliability of biometric technologies, especially for manual labourers in hot, humid climates, is questionable," Moody's stressed.

Modi government's response

The government slammed the report for lacking primary or secondary data to support its claims and for only referencing UIDAI's website.

"The investor service did not make any attempt to ascertain facts regarding the issues raised with regard to UIDAI. The sole reference cited in the report is in respect of the UIDAI, by referring to its website," the government's statement read.

Citing responses to parliamentary inquiries, the statement reiterated that no security breaches had been reported in the Aadhaar database.

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Furthermore, the government clarified that workers didn't require biometric authentication to link their Aadhaar numbers to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) database or receive payments under the scheme.

MGNREGA is an Indian social welfare measure launched by former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh in2005 that aims to guarantee the 'right to work' to rural Indian citizens, with a specific focus on employing unskilled labourers as a matter of right.

Earlier this month, during the G20 Summit in New Delhi, the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI) document, prepared by the World Bank, praised the transformative impact of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in India in the last 10 years.

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