Research
Digital Public Infrastructure
STACK IS THE NEW BLACK?: EVOLUTION AND OUTCOMES OF THE 'INDIA-STACKIFICATION' PROCESS
Computer Law & Security Review, Volume 52, April 2024
India is going through a transformative phase in its digital journey. A large part of this is enfolding in the field of digital public infrastructures as the ‘India Stack’ branded suite of technological solutions permeates through areas like digital identity, instant payments, digital commerce, and consent management. The paper traces the socio-technical imaginaries that have fueled India's digital transformation strategy and how India Stack acquired its central place in that scheme. Drawing upon India's performance on global ICT-related indices and the OECD's Good Practice Principles for Public Service Design and Delivery, the paper also examines how the country is faring in translating its visions of digital transformation into outcomes. It identifies reliance on coercive digital adoption strategies, lack of participative decision-making, and insufficient accountability safeguards as some of the fault lines in India's path to fair and equitable digital transformation.
INDIA'S POLICY RESPONSES TO BIG TECH: AND AN EYE ON THE RISE OF 'ALT BIG TECH'
Indian Journal of Law and Technology, Volume 18, Issue 1, 2022
The term ‘big tech’ offers a helpful and widely used label for describing the world’s most powerful technology companies. The challenges posed by big tech across the domains of competition, innovation, human rights, and social and political impact are real and immediate. So is the need for building more effective checks against them. India is still in the early stages of formulating its strategy on big tech, through the traditional playbook of competition, enforcement, and domain-specific regulatory interventions. But it has also adopted a more novel strategy of relying on open APIs and interoperability standards to counter the market features that enable the concentration of power in the hands of dominant tech players.
The paper studies the Unified Payments Interface, the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture, and the Open Network for Digital Commerce as examples of such technical systems. It argues that while recognising the innovation and progress of these new systems, it is also important to keep an eye on their potential to emerge as ‘alt big tech’ – systems that create new opportunities for dominance and power play that can bear significant consequences for competition, innovation, and public interest in the long run.
AN ANALYSIS OF INDIA'S NEW DATA EMPOWERMENT AND PROTECTION ARCHITECTURE
In Emerging Trends in Data Governance, Centre for Communication Governance (January, 2023)
This paper traces the evolution of the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA), which represents the consent layer of the India Stack framework, and its focus on user consent as the means to operationalize data empowerment. It offers an explanation of DEPA’s institutional structure an current adoption path in areas like the financial sector and in the digital health infrastructure. Given DEPA’s focus on consent as the basis for user empowerment, the paper also emphasizes the consent conundrum -- how consent is recognised to be broken for several reasons but still remains an indispensable part of informational privacy frameworks. This discussion is vital to the subsequent analysis of DEPA’s effectiveness as a solution to the consent problem, exploring its positive and negative aspects, in terms of its design features and broader questions of process and governance.
ANALYSIS OF INDIA'S AAROGYA SETU APP
Smriti Parsheera, Nikhil Narendran, Swati Muthukumar and Aparajita Lath
CyberBRICS Project, 28 August, 2020
This analysis of the Aarogya Setu app focuses on issues of transparency in the app’s code and development process, its mandatory application, in certain contexts, and the implications for user privacy. The piece builds on the impact assessment of the Aarogya Setu app published by the authors in Report on Technology Governance in a Time of Crisis.
Digital Identity
PARTICIPATION OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES IN INDIA'S AADHAAR PROJECT
Working Paper, September, 2020
The adoption of digital identity systems is often backed by an inclusionary narrative, targeted mainly towards vulnerable and marginalized groups. Yet, the reality of many such projects tends to be marred by the invisibility of the very same groups from the dominant policy and research discourse. Focusing on the interaction of persons with disabilities with the world’s largest national digital identity project, Aadhaar, this paper evaluates the extent to which the interests of persons with disabilities were accounted for in the design, planning and implementation of Aadhaar. It does so based on interactions with stakeholders, review of the Unique Identification Authority of India’s documentation and the literature on bio-metric usability. The paper identifies several gaps in the design and roll out of the project and highlights better participation, usability assessment, accessibility and redress as some of the main areas where much more work is required.
THE AADHAAR JUDGMENT USES THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY TEST IN TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WAYS
Rishab Bailey and Smriti Parsheera
The Scroll, 27 September, 2018.
Released soon after the Supreme Court's verdict in the Aadhaar case, this piece examines how the different judges applied the tests of legality, legitimate aim and proportionality in their analysis of Aadhaar. We discuss the significant divergence in the judicial opinions, not only in terms of legal analysis, but also in the judges' factual understanding of Aadhaar. This highlights the challenges of using the judicial route for the determination of complex technology related problems.
OPEN DATA AND DIGITAL IDENTITY: LESSONS FOR AADHAAR
Amba Kak, Smriti Parsheera, Vinod Kotwal
International Telecommunications Union's Kaleidoscope Conference, Nanjing, China, November 2017.
Aadhaar, the largest national biometric system in the world, has been lauded for its promise to bring effciencies to government service delivery, and the stimulus to private sector innovation. Yet it is contested and criticised for the vulnerabilities created by biometric data, potential threats to privacy and exclusion. However, in all of this, there has been relatively less exploration of the 'open data' possibilities from the Aadhaar ecosystem.
Every day, large volumes of data are being generated through the use of Aadhaar-enabled authentication and eKYC systems, both by government and private entities. The challenge now is to find ways to nudge the UIDAI and all users of Aadhaar towards greater sharing of data, in privacy-protecting ways that do not create risks for Aadhaar-number holders. We propose an implementation framework that can achieve these goals by leveraging the existing provisions of the Aadhaar Act to create an open data ecosystem that balances the needs of openness and privacy.