I was warned that my mobile number must be linked with my Aadhar number. I depend on my mobile phone immensely, perhaps too much. I did not want to be cut off. So, having failed to make the connection with Aadhar from my phone, I went to my mobile service provider. The assistant offered to help me using the simple One Time Password method. There was no need for any bio-metric verification of my identity. Just my precious Aadhar number. As he tapped it in, I wondered what was whirring in some mysterious computer data-bases somewhere to confirm who I was. After several failed attempts, the verification did work. I was relieved and thanked the assistant profusely. My precious mobile connectivity was secure. When at night I got an sms that the verification had failed, I felt even more insecure than I had before. What would happen now?
Over a billion people in India, up in the hills and down in the plains, in crowded cities and in remote villages, have been provided with unique numbers linked with personal bio-metric markers of their identities. Aadhar is deservedly celebrated as a marvel of project execution. It compares with the conduct of massive elections in India, the world’s largest democracy, in which hundreds of millions of people, even in the remotest parts of the country, cast their votes electronically.
Aadhar is becoming an ubiquitous requirement for life in India. Banks require the number. Tax authorities must have it, and phone service providers too. Those entitled to subsidized services will not get them unless they have the magical number. Whereas to some people this is a sign of the Aadhar project’s success, others fear the consequences of the spread of Aadhar on India’s democracy. Concerns of invasion of privacy have reached the Supreme Court. Citizens are worried about denial of services if the technology fails. They also fear that the seeding of their Aadhar numbers into many processes will increase the state’s ability to snoop into their lives.
If one were to write the story of Aadhar, which story should one write? The story of a successful project that gave a billion people, within 8 years, a unique identity number based on their personal bio-metric markers? Or, the story of the uses of this number by the government and many service providers and the effect of this on the lives of citizens?
The project story is a remarkable story. Nandan Nilekani gave up his job as the successful CEO of India’s most admired company to achieve an audacious goal. His small team of dedicated people expanded with many others joining voluntarily, even without compensation. What they proposed to achieve, using technologies which were new and often not yet fully proven, was unprecedented. The audacity of the project and the innovations required excited the imaginations of their supporters. The audacity and the novelty also created fear in others. Nandan and his core team had to steer through a maze of politics and bureaucracy to get support from friendly enablers and overcome the disablers.
Stories of teams that achieve unexpected results are very inspiring. They are worth recalling, and more stories of remarkable leaders and their teams must be written. If well analyzed and explained, they can provide good practices for others who take on similar big challenges. They make very good case studies for schools of management. Stories describing the passions and emotions of participants in great teams, that achieved remarkable results against great odds, in sports, in war, and development of new technologies, make great books and movies too. Some examples are: The Conquest of Everest, Saving Private Ryan, the US Apollo Project, and stories of many accomplishments of India’s space program. The Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, the Human Genome project to map the human genome, and Tim Berners-Lee’s Weaving the Web, an account of the creation of the world-wide-web, are exciting stories of teamwork to develop new technologies.
Stories of developments of new technologies never end with the projects that created them. The more powerful the technologies, the more complicated are the next stages of the stories. The Manhattan Project accomplished its stated mission when an atomic bomb was produced at the Los Alamos Laboratories. Then another difficult project was organized to drop two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stephen Walker recounts the story of this project in his book, Shockwave. The success of the projects stunned the world, with the power of the technology that had been unleashed. Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, physicists who had urged the US President to develop nuclear energy, were dismayed with the use to which the new technology had been put. The leader of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, expressed his anguish ‘over the fact that no ethical decision of any weight or nobility has been addressed to the problem of atomic weapons.’
Stories that do not end
Some stories end when the project’s mission is accomplished: the summit was reached; Private Ryan was rescued. There is nothing more interesting to write about. In stories of notable technological achievements, such as the building of an atomic bomb and the decoding of the human genome, the story does not end when the project’s goal is reached. Projects that create new technologies are like pregnancies: stories about the incubation of a baby in a mother’s womb. The projects, like pregnancies, are remarkable stories of the marshalling of resources to shape a new creation, like a mother’s body does to give birth to a baby. Gynecologists and obstetricians, who understand how the process works, can help women to deliver healthy babies safely. Similarly, stories of technology projects are very valuable to teach management students the skills for developing new business ideas.
When a baby is born, the mother’s creation becomes free to impact the world around it. Another story begins, a more complex one, which can take many different directions. It is thus with technologies too. They are often delivered into the world by remarkable projects, as was nuclear energy, the code of the human genome, the design of the internet, and the constructs of Google and Facebook. Then, as the technologies are put to use, more complex questions arise. Not merely technological questions, but political questions, and ethical questions. What uses should this technology be put too? Who will own it? How will it be regulated? More characters come into the story and many strands must be interwoven into it. Accounts of the pregnancy and delivery of the baby are less interesting in great biographies than are the histories of the multi-faceted developments that follow.
The complex story of Aadhar has begun. Ethical questions about privacy, societal questions about entitlement to benefits, and political questions about the power of the state, must be addressed. Should not these form the bulk of the story of Aadhar that needs to be written now? Who should be the principal characters of this story?
There are no agreements so far about these matters. How then should Aadhar’s story be written when it is not yet finished? Whenever these matters come up, the Aadhar project team points out that they only provided a tool. They are not responsible for the way it is used. Some people say the creators of the Aadhar technology cannot wash their hands off its consequences. The designers should have anticipated what their creation would be used for. They must have got some inkling of intended applications when they were gathering political support for their project. They should have built safeguards into the technology before releasing the genie from the bottle. However, just as the contrite scientists who released the power of the atom could not control its use, Aadhar’s inventors cannot now control its applications.
Technology and Ethics
Digital technologies are transforming the world. They are accelerating advances in robotics and artificial intelligence which, according to forecasters, could make humans redundant. Social media has altered the quality of public discourse for the worse, many fear. People are being divided into groups who listen only to people they like and who think like them. Threats to social harmony and public safety have increased with technologies which, their inventors had hoped with innocent enthusiasm, would increase social harmony by enabling people to connect with each other more easily. Now, some of them, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, accept that they should do something to regulate use of their creations.
Humanity must take charge of technology whereas technology seems to be overtaking humanity. Voices of caution about advances of new technologies—social media, robotics, genetic crops, and Aadhar—are dismissed as those of backward, anti-technology Luddites. It always works out well in the end so do not resist, the innocent promoters of technology say.
Leaders should be concerned with ethical issues. Inventors of new technologies and business leaders have great power in societies. The best business schools have realized that they should not teach their students only how to manage projects and produce business results. They must teach them ethics too. Ethical choices are generally very difficult. For example, there is the ‘utility’ question that philosophers have debated over centuries. Should the needs of a few be sacrificed to provide the maximum benefit for the maximum number of people (a question that has come up with Aadhar too)? There is the also the difficult question of the rights of individuals versus the needs of communities, which complicates policies when rights for privacy clash with needs for collective security. Ethical problems often require trade-offs between two good principles. A good answer to a profound ethical question in practice often is, ‘it depends’. There are no absolute answers to difficult ethical questions. If there were, ethics could be taught from a textbook of rules.
Ethical decisions require a knowledge of conflicting principles, which may conflict in practice, as well as an understanding of different types of facts about the situation. Whereas stories of decisions that executives took which led on to success or failure of projects and growth or decline of businesses are good case studies to teach management, stories illuminating the ethical dilemmas faced by the protagonists are required to teach ethics.
The same event may be seen through many different lenses. Each will reveal different truths, as Kurosawa demonstrated in his classic movie, Rashomon. Writers choose what they want their stories to reveal. They simplify their work when they take only one view: a story written in black-and-white. Project started; difficulties encountered; difficulties overcome; project accomplished; celebration; story ended. However, the story becomes more real, and the writers’ work more difficult, when they attempt to weave many perspectives together and the story must be written in many shades of grey. Moreover, it is not obvious when the writer should end the story when many important strands of the story have not yet ended.
A good book on Aadhar
Readers make choices about the kinds of stories they want to read, and what they want to learn.
Writers make choices too, about what their books will be about, and which readers they are writing for. When a topic is controversial and when powerful people, in government or large businesses, become overly sensitive to criticism, writers require courage to tell all sides of a story. Lines are drawn: either you are with the powers or you are against them. If they are seen to be on the other side writers can be threatened with cases for defamation, very costly for writers to fight, or with criminal charges and imprisonment. Constructive criticism of Aadhar is becoming difficult when criminal charges are filed against a journalist revealing a leak in the system’s security.
As Aadhar’s applications multiply, and citizens’ fears rise, the story of the Aadhar card with its unique number has become much more complicated than a good story of teamwork to produce a large scale technological solution. It has become a story about human rights, about rights to privacy and justice, and about the power of the state.
A strand within the Aadhar story that should attract the attention of all who care about India’s democracy would be an account of how deliberations regarding Aadhar were conducted within policy circles and in the media. There could be some lessons from this to strengthen the fabric of India’s deliberative democracy which is fraying.
Good books illuminate complex stories. They reveal the values that guided the decisions of the story’s actors. They also reveal what their authors value and care about. Great books, like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, pack in many stories with many strands. A great book on Aadhar, weaving several strands of its complex story, will engage many people—managers, policy-makers, and citizens.
Many books have been written since 1945 about the Manhattan Project from different perspectives; some soon after the bombs were ‘successfully’ exploded and the project completed; and others decades afterwards, like Stephen Walker’s Shockwave in 2006. Some books on Aadhar have been published already. More will be written as the wider and longer term consequences become clear, of a successful technological project to give a billion people a unique number linked to their bio-metric markers without control over how the information connected with these numbers would be used.
I am looking out for a book on Aadhar that is not merely a celebration of a successful project. I am looking for a book that can take me along many journeys about the societal, political, and ethical implications of Aadhar, with insights about what makes these issues more challenging to address than the technological and management issues which I sense Project Aadhar had addressed very well. I am looking for a good book that, drawing on the Aadhar experience, throws more light on how to improve the conduct of a democratic public discourse to shape better policies.