Adhaar of government subsidies.Privacy has been a
Adhaar – a Sanskrit word that means ‘foundation’, or ‘base’ – was designed to reach even the most excluded residents and those least likely to possess an official identity: women, migrants, children and those living in hard-to-reach areas.
Underpinning this ambition was the Indian government’s recognition that proof of identity is a key driver of socio-economic development, enabling individuals to access vital services such as healthcare, education, mobile and financial products, and a myriad of government subsidies.Privacy has been a key focus in the recent debate on Aadhaar, with main concern on ‘data security’, whether data stored in the Central Identities Data Repository is secure? Other related concerns even if the data is secure are Identity theft: increase the risk of banking fraud, Personal integrity: No system available to exclude the information we don’t wish to share and Surveillance: with centralized database, where we have no control of our own data and a single identifier i.e aadhaar number linking all databases becomes a tool for profiling and surveillance. Also, several instances have been reported in which Aadhaar cards have been issued to immigrants without identity proofs.
The rise of decentralisation ushered in by blockchain technology has offered up a practical new way to manage Digital Identity. Self sovereign identity puts us firmly in control of our own personal data and crowdsourcing can help in verifying identity claims that prove who we are. Crowdsourcing along with decentralization would help gathering more authentic information and eliminate corruption to receive benefits for services such as healthcare, education, goverment subsides and increasing the user privacy and security. It can be pictured as a Aadhaar app which is a secure, digital drawer of verified identity claims that proves who you are are.We can create an ecosystem to manage digital identity where both the users and businesses get the benefits of a hassle free way to exchange information at reduced cost. It also ensures privacy and trust, where transactions are secure, authenticated and verifiable and endorsed by involved participants. Users and entities contributing to the ecosystem can earn monetary benefits when doing transactions such as attestation , verification or proof of identity is to be shared. Aadhaar Coins enable the users and entities to make transactions, which are stored on the blockchain ensuring privacy and trust.
A user can create an account and upload his documents to register on the identity platform, whenever the platform receives a new registration, Aadhaar coins are minted and credited to the user account after the confirmation that no such user existed earlier which can be achieved through bio identification.A user can earn validations from other participants (friends, family etc.) more the number of validations received by a user profile the greater will be the authenticity of the user, whenever a user requests to receive validations aadhaar coins are debited from the user wallet and credited to the validator and vice versa when a user performs validation for other users. Users can also earn additional coins by inviting friends and making transactions.There can be permissioned participants on the platform which can validate users, such validations would carry a higher validation score, the cost of receiving the validation would be greater as compared to normal users but once the user profile has been verified by a permissioned participant the user can earn more aadhaar coins to perform validations.The businesses can benefit from reduced cost and time to perform KYC for granting services to their customers. When a user requests to use a service from a business, Identity checks and other essential information is requested by the business from the user, the higher the authentication score of the user profile the less the TAT for processing and lesser the cost incurred by the business.
Aadhaar coins are charged from the business account and credited to the user account. The government would be able to identify the poor in a better way to disburse socio-economic benefits eliminating cases of forged identity and obtaining of fake documents to receive benefits meant for the poor. Aadhaar coins could be used for disbursing monetary benefits to the poor.Aadhaar coins can be spent on essential goods and services (food, shelter etc.) with local supporting partners can even be exchanged for currency.
To achieve such a system the people need to be educated about the benefits of crowdsourcing to create value and role of decentralized systems which enable the users to control their data. Also, a lucrative model needs to be build which attracts more users to the platform. Such a model will solve the problem of data theft, privacy breach, corruption and will significantly save the costs and time involved for completing the current lengthy offline procedures.
