Losing It Before It Began: The Aadhaar Challenge | The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities

In The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities, Shivam Shankar Singh and Anand Venkatanarayanan dive into the operations of political parties, cyber criminals, godmen, nation states and intelligence agencies from around the world to explain how the power to manipulate your thoughts is being harnessed, and how information warfare is shaping your life and world. Read an excerpt:

The narrative that drove the push for India’s biometric ID, Aadhaar, was that it would save the government millions of dollars that it was losing due to leakages and misappropriation of government subsidies being distributed to the nation’s citizens. The country spends $10 billion each year on welfare subsidy and a large part of it was believed to be lost because of non-existent beneficiaries (ghosts) or duplicate beneficiaries (same individual enrolled multiple times). The initial pitch for the project showed that even if there were only 10 per cent false beneficiaries in the system, the fiscal savings after removing them would be $1 billion per year, and this would pay for the entire project within three years. There were three central elements in this narrative that were quite powerful:

1. The narrative was directed towards a specific audience with a pre-defined belief: the income-tax-paying middle class, who historically held the belief that they paid disproportionately high taxes that were then wasted on welfare schemes that were corrupt and leaking.

2. It told a simple story of how Aadhaar would make the government more efficient by cutting down corruption and wastage.

3. The target audience for this message, the middle class, was bound to be overawed by the large numbers and would accept them without analysing them critically.

This narrative was built and repeated quite successfully over years. No one ever looked at the evidence or the total lack of it, yet the fact that Aadhaar would save the government a huge amount of money became conventional wisdom that didn’t even require proof. The phenomenon that resulted in such mass acceptance of the narrative can be termed ‘affinity fraud’, where people have strong incentives to not look critically at an issue because everyone in their social circle already believes it to be the reality.

To illustrate the appeal of this narrative, even at the peak of the debate against Aadhaar in 2018, one of the authors of this book did a small straw poll at the NullCon conference in Goa while giving a talk about affinity fraud. The audience was composed of hackers from around the world, a group that depends on critical thinking for its employment.

The four questions asked, and the responses, are as under:

1. Do you think you pay more taxes than necessary? (100 per cent said yes)

2. Do you think the government wastes your tax money on subsidies? (100 per cent said yes)

3. Do you think a digital ID that creates mass surveillance problems, which you all understand well, is a legitimate solution to solving subsidy leakage? (70 per cent said yes)

4. Would you change your opinion if I told you that the digital ID project did not save billions, but was a net negative instead? (30 per cent were conflicted)

The answers to questions three and four are illuminating because it shows that even minds trained to be critical are not immune to propaganda. While hackers are trained to think critically about computers and systems, this training did not make them more aware of their own biases, which could be used against them. As the And Then the Cows Came Home 219 cognitive and computational expert David Perlman observed in his talk on cyber operations, ‘Biases generally err towards ego and social consistency and these biases affect everyone, including you,’ and exhorted everyone to ‘Red team their own brains’.

Given what we know about the conjuring of a reality now, it becomes obvious that the push to counter the propaganda surrounding the savings figures of Aadhaar came too late to make a difference. Even though all evidence shows that the savings figures owing to Aadhaar were nothing more than a constructed lie, the evidence came at a stage where it didn’t matter. The claim of the then chief economic advisor, Arvind Subramaniam, that the digital ID-powered subsidy resulted in savings of ‘$2 billion in one year alone’, allowed the Supreme Court of India to give the go-ahead for using the ID on a voluntary basis. The savings figures were first rebutted by an International Institute for Sustainable Development study29 that pointed out that savings from Aadhaar could not have been more than $16 million, while the first year of the programme itself had cost the taxpayer $200 million. Subsequent analysis by one of the authors also showed that the Aadhaar project cost close to $1 billion and had a net negative impact for the exchequer.

When noted economists Jean Dreze and Reetika Khera pointed out that an oft-cited World Bank report, which said the digital ID would save $11 billion in total,31 had in fact simply replaced the word ‘transfers’ with ‘savings’, and the claim was in essence a typing mistake, what followed showed how little reality mattered when it came to shaping the narrative around Aadhaar. Further follow-up on the matter by one of the authors resulted in the World Bank changing the computation methodology post-facto. They acknowledged that their calculation data was wrong, and yet they arrived at the same number using a completely new set of data. Jean Dreze and Reetika Khera termed the entire World Bank report on savings ‘extrapolations’.

 

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