Unit 8
How David Eaves teaches Unit 8 (part 4)
Aadhaar Case Study
What is this page?
This is a detailed breakdown of how David Eaves, a Lecturer at the University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), teaches the contents of Unit 8 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. See how parts one, two and three are taught.
This page is part of a series of twenty-five classes that David developed originally for the Harvard Kennedy School's master and executive education programs, where he taught for eight years, and are now taught at UCL's master and applied learning programs.
We believe presenting diverse ways to teach the syllabus will help others adopt and teach the material in various contexts. See here how Konstanz University's Prof Ines Mergel teaches the same unit.
Who is this page for?
This page was developed for university faculty who teach public administrators or master's levels students in public policy and public administration. This material may also be suitable for teaching to upper year undergraduates.
Class Overview
In this unit's first class, we presented both a high level model of digital era government - the platform government - and different ways governments are adopting this model. One approach involves building out "shared components" that offer government departments a common set of tools to perform common tasks such as authentication, payments or notifications.
India's Aadhaar, a national biometric identification system, acts as an enabler of this strategy. It creates a common tool to authentic any resident of India for any government, and even private sector, service. An identification system that facilitates 1.2 billion Indians access to services and limits leakage offers significant benefits, but may also known and unknown risks and challenges. What are they and how was the Indian government able to navigate and overcome some of these constraints? This class will discuss the technical, administrative and political benefits and challenges associated with the largest-scale digital transformation project in history.
This Class' Learning Objectives
By the end of this lecture students should be able to:
Anticipate and analyze the most common types of barriers they will encounter when trying to bring about change (both digital and non digital) within governments.
Create solutions to help overcome barriers to digital era change in a government context
Analyze the trade offs in efficacy and efficiency with privacy and security
Think critically about the governance of digital public goods and how to manage the public's concerns over trust and safety
How this class relates to the Digital Era Competencies
💡 This class has a specific focus on Competencies:
Competency 5 - Barriers
Competency 3 - Multidisciplinary
Competency 6 - Openness
See all eight digital era competencies here.
Assigned Reading and Practical Resources
As they work through the readings in advance, students should have in mind the following questions to help them prepare for class:
What are the promise and perils of the Aadhaar project?
What is the governance and oversight of Aadhaar and how did it evolve over time?
What lessons can observers draw from the Aadhaar project about how to create and scale a government platform service?
If you were a member of the Indian Lok Sabha in 2016, participating in a free vote on the money bill that formalized Aadhaar, would you vote in favor or against? Why?
Core Reading (Required)
Aadhaaar: India's Big Experiment with Unique Identification (2018), Kennedy School Case Study by Daniel Goldberg and David Eaves
Advanced Reading (Optional)
Aadhaar - Inclusive by Design (2017), Report by GSMA
State of Aadhaar Reports, Reports by Dalberg and Omidyar Network
Calling for a more empirical debate on the Aadhaar experience (2018), Article by Ronald Abraham, Elizabeth Bennett, and Neil Buddy Shah for Mint
Detailed Class Breakdown
Class plan: 75 minutes
The segments below describe the dynamics of each part of the class. The videos were edited to only display the most relevant parts of each section:
Segment 1 - What is Aadhar? – 25'
Purpose
In this first pasture the goal is to lay a foundation of what the case is about. To enable students to orientate around what problem Aadhaar sought to solve. It is also (optionally) an opportunity to provide a brief overview of the technology involved in Aadhaar). Understanding these questions will lay the foundation for the subsequent discussions on the technical, political and administrative implications of Aadhaar.
Questions to pose students
What is Aadhaar?
What is a biometric identity and what problems does it solve? What are the benefits does Aadhaar generate?
What is the government's theory of change for implementing this identification system?
Video of David teaching this segment
Discussion and Debrief
This segment is interactive and is designed to incentivize students' participation and reflection. Instructors are encouraged to pose the three questions below and comment after significant engagement:
What is Aadhar?
A few elements are essential to the answer: the fact that it is a national, biometric and foundational identification system. This means that it is an effort to connect every individual in India to one [unique identifier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_identifier#:~:text=A unique identifier (UID) is,with an atomic data type.).
What is biometric?
Biometric identifications use biological traits to identify individuals. For many students the most common association with biometry is the use of fingerprints. But instructors should remind students of other methods such as iris scan, facial recognition, hand geometry, voice analysis, walking gait, among others.
What are Aadhaar's benefits? And what problems does it solve?
Instructors can highlight:
As a foundational identification, it can be used to authenticate users into various services or enable the creation of functional identification on top of it;
In a diverse country, it is a common language to access government services. It can help ensure access to government (and private sector) services for individuals who are illiterate or not tech savvy.
It allows governments to move towards a platform approach (as seen in classes two and fifteen);
It saves money by decreasing duplication errors, fraud and inefficient targeting;
It improves inclusion through its universality;
It is a way of providing human dignity by recognizing every person as an individual.
Segment 2 - Downsides and Risks – 20'
Purpose of this segment
Even though Aadhaar's potential benefits are significant, its risks are non-negligible and not obvious to some at the time it was implemented. As more countries look to India as the North Star for designing their digital identities, having clarity over the risks and downsides helps governments make more informed decision. The purpose of this segment is to make these risks explicit.
Video of David teaching this segment
Discussion Questions and Debrief
This segment starts with the question it proposes to answer: "What are real and possible downsides of Aadhaar?" Students are split into smaller groups for five minutes to discuss.
In the debrief, instructors can talk over the issues below. While this isn't a comprehensive list, it is a starting point to reflect on the risks:
Technical problems:
The use of fingerprints might not work for field workers whose fingerprints change or rub off due to intensive work
Some errors due to improperly maintained scanners, environmental conditions, similar biometrics could result in individuals being denied benefits (even a small error rate in a country like India can have real impacts)
Administrative and Implementation problems:
Sharing access to Aadhaar data across numerous regional governments and national agencies requires robust access management, tokenization of unique identifiers and other systems to ensure no misuse of the data - there is some evidence that some of these systems were not in place.
The registration of citizens into Aadhaar was conducted by private vendors who may not have been wholly reliable
Security Issues:
Centralizing information about every citizen creates a tempting target for hackers and criminals.
Unlike passwords, biometrics cannot be changed and thus present a unique challenge if compromised
Power abuse or discrimination:
Unique identifiers enable governments to connect data about citizens across government agencies, this can be used to create enhanced services, but could also, in theory, be used to profile and target citizens
It is not obvious how to weight these concerns against the benefits. There is no unique or correct view, but public leaders should be aware of these challenges and analyze under local context.
Segment 3 - Governance – 35'
Purpose of this segment
As a technical solution Aadhaar appears to solve many problems, but the risks discussed created numerous challenges to implementing it in India. How was the leadership team able to navigate the political constraints? This segment aims at discussing these questions to shed some light on how to overcome political and administrative barriers.
Video of David teaching this segment
Discussion Questions and Debrief
The goal of this section is to understand the governance of Aadhaar, the source of its legitimacy and how it evolved over time.
This segment starts with two provoking questions: "How did Aadhaar get created and who oversees the work?" "How did the project evolve over time?"
Many students focus on the technical aspects of this case but sometimes pay little attention to the governance structure. The implementation of Aadhaar involved a brilliant technical strategy and an even more deft political strategy. This involved seeing off internal competitors, legal and policy constraints, and enabled the service to gain early programatic and technical success that ensured continued support.
The answer to these two questions should highlight part of the strategy:
Aadhaar's creators always envisioned it would become a national foundational ID. It's unclear the degree to which the public was notified or consulted regarding this intention. Its initial roll out as an authentication tool for a specific benefit allowed the service was brilliant in that it allowed it to be tested at a significant scale, but it may also have obfuscated the ultimate intent.
Adding to the confusing is that, up until 2016, Aadhaar did not have any legal foundation. To resolve this issue the government of the day formalized Aadhaar and some supporting policies through the passage of a money bill. Money bills in India are not supposed to contain new policy positions, only providing funding for existing projects. In addition, money bills do not require assent by the Upper Chamber, which the government of the day did not control.
Did this (or should this) process undermine the legitimacy, trust and confidence of Aadhaar? David likes to ask four subsequent questions to highlight some of the tradeoffs and principles in place behind this decision making process:
First question
The goal of this question is to make students reflect if they agree with process that was chosen to pass the bill.
Second question
The goal of this question is to make students internalize how they would react to the risks they learned about in this segment. Would students be more concerned about the legal infrastructure?
Third question
What, if any, steps should the India government take today to provide more governance around the Aadhaar platform?
Fourth question
The goal of this question is to check for consistency in students' arguments.
Often a significant number of students will be in favor of using Aadhaar in India, but opposed to using it in the United states. Students will often argue that the benefits in India are more significant than in the United States making the trade off between privacy and security worthwhile.
Instructors should push students on their position. For example, if students consider privacy and security as absolute values and use this position to justify not implementing Aadhaar in the United States, why would they take a different position in India?
Again, there is no right answer to this question. The goal is to push students to think of what governance - if any - would make them comfortable with the use of this technology.
Finally, David ends the class with a word of caution about the future. Most of the questions raised in this class are unresolved and pose significant risks, especially now that digital identifications are increasingly popular in the developing world. How should benefits and risks be weighted? These are questions every country should seriously consider before adopting this strategy.
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Acknowledgements
David Eaves would like to note that this material was made possible by numerous practitioners and other faculty who have generously shared stories, pedagogy and their practices. David is also grateful to the students of DPI 662 at the Harvard Kennedy School for enriching the course and providing consent to have the material and questions shared. Finally, an enormous thank you must be given to Beatriz Vasconcellos, who helped assemble and organize the content on this page.